Blog: ShowSize, Articles and tips

I am looking for a Utility to report when files were last used on a Windows 2003 server. This is to allow me to determine what can be archived and the disk space required. Can ShowSize do that?

Yes, it can. Please scan one of your drives by using ShowSize. Then see the “Unused Files” report. The only problem is that some Windows versions can turn off the update of last access date of files. Windows Vista does that.

You can verify whether your Windows system does that by using ShowSize on a folder that you used recently. See what the report Unused Files shows in the “Used date” or “Not used days” columns for some known files. For a file reported to be used many days back, see its Explorer properties. This will update the last access date to today’s date (on properties) if the feature is not turned off on your Windows system. Then a refresh from ShowSize will also remove that file from the report.

Once you verify that Windows is recording the access date correctly, you can run ShowSize on other locations. But beware of locations shared with Vista computers. Those by default turn off this feature.

Note: In this case, Bob Thomson (who originally asked this question) did confirm that the feature to update the last access date was already ON on Windows 2003 and ShowSize worked perfectly on Windows 2003.

Can ShowSize list ALL files even in sub-folders that were created on a certain date, such as, all files created today or a date I can enter? I would love to be able to see all the files created or modified today because I have a disk that is filling up fast and not sure with thousands of sub-folders where the data is going.

Instead of putting all the possible features in filters and making them too complicated, we have made the reports more flexible, epsecially when you can do the sorting on any column.

For example, you can get the files created or modified on a certain date by using the “Only Files” report (not available in ShowSize PE). Once you get this report, click (once or twice) on the “Modified” column header, so that the files are sorted in the recently modified date order and the most recently modified file comes at the top. Then select the range of files in the dates you are interested in (click and shift-Click) and copy-paste to a document. Please have a look at the screen shots for “Only Files Report” to get an clear idea.

Another alternative is to export the report to a CSV file. You can do further analysis of the data by importing this CSV file to a database or a spreadsheet.

Incidentally, we have a an advanced option that allows you to use modified time as “later” of create and modified time, making the reports even more useful.

This article is posted again under http://showsize.com/blog/index.php/2008/10/06/last-used-files/

Yes, you can put on the option to display values in bytes in the General page of the Options screen.

The reports “Only Files” and “Folders and Files” show modified date. Moreover an advanced option allows you to use modified time as “later” of create and modified time making it even more useful.

Other useful report from this point of view is the Active Folders report which allows you to see how much activity occurred in the folders by Size Modified and Number of files Modified in last so many days.

We used to have a report “Unused Files” but we had to remove it on Windows Vista as Vista does not support that feature. You can see this report on earlier Windows systems but with a warning about volumes shared with Vista computers.

ShowSize has many reports now. Moreover they are highly customizable. Hence, exporting columnized text output is not possible.

But we have given the CSV file export just for this purpose. Just export to a CSV file either from Tools menu or on command line. Then you can open it in Microsoft Excel to get the columnized spreadsheet. Once in Excel, you can do your own calculations too.

If you have Microsoft Word you can do a database insert from the CSV file to make a proper document. If you have a database program, you can do the same thing and create a database. The options are limitless with CSV export.