Sale is now over and this article is closed.
We’re glad to announce version 5.1 of ShowSize with many fixes and some new features. ShowSize 5.1 is compatible with Windows 7 and it has passed Microsoft designed tests.
The paid users can get the new version from the self-service web site support.showsize.com.
For more details on major new features, please see this page:
http://showsize.com/showsize51.aspx
“I use ShowSize as a tool to assist in the development of Excel Workbook Reports for our IT staff. The tool has also become valuable in the migration (virtualization) of our servers into an IBM Data Center running VMware Infrastructure and analyzing data at the multi-terabyte level.
At my most routine use, ShowSize allows me to investigate where data is hiding when a user reports a space usage problem, or when a fellow IT member wants to know where (and to whom) disk space is allocated on a particular server.
For analysis, I use ShowSize in gathering the size information of all data on our file servers and then exporting those scans into Excel where I can further analyze the data. For instance, getting the size data on top-level shares allows me to create folder-size comparison sets at the departmental and section (or building) level and reporting that into average and total amounts per server and location.
I also use ShowSize in analyzing NTFS ownership information on the data itself. Getting this information from our servers allows the creation of in-depth reports showing our user’s space utilization. When aggregating this information across servers (and across users) it allows me to create summaries on the lowest, highest, and average points of space utilization per user in our organization at the server, department, or section level.
Using the data gathered from ShowSize, I create reports on a regular basis for storage comparison or for specific projects. Since ShowSize works at any point between the server and user level it has become a key resource in analyzing our data. This allows us to plan future storage needs thus assisting us with expense projections for additional disk and backup hardware.”
Note from ShowSize support: The ShowSize report that William often uses is the Owners report. This report is available in the minimum 5 user license edition of ShowSize. The 5-user edition also supports saving of reports for subsequent viewing on any systems, even those not connected to the original system or its disks. The report viewer is fully interactive, allowing you to apply the filters or sorts on the collected data and to see any of the 7 reports in a tabbed interface.
I am beginning this Usage Notes section with an interesting article sent by William Devlin. In the coming weeks, I hope to add more such notes or tips on the actual usage.
If you are a ShowSize customer and have some usage tips to share, you are welcome to send them to our support email address. We would be happy to post the article here for the benefit of all the users.
We just released an update 5.0.5 for the paid version of ShowSize and ShowSize PE. It contains some minor fixes for a bug that affects the File Types report and Owners report when the filters are ON.
This version also contains some improvements in the Save/View Report feature available in the 5+ license editions of ShowSize. To get complete details and the download, the paid customers can login to the self-service web site support.showsize.com.
As a developer, the “Only Files” report is most useful to me. When using Visual Studio 2005, I often have my ASP.NET web site projects several levels deep. I keep a copy of the actual web site in another location from where I upload it by ftp to the server. This is so because the web.config in the local project and in production web site is different and uses different connections and flags.
When I have made modifications to my ASP.NET project and want to deploy them to production, I want to carefully see the list of files I have changed recently and then decide which ones I want to copy over. I could use an automatic folder syncing tool. But I’m wary of such tools that often do not give enough customization choices and one mistake can wipe out lot of work.
I use the “Only Files” report in ShowSize to quickly get a list of files I have changed in the project no matter where they are located within the project structure. Here is a picture:
As you can see above, this report lists “all” the files in my asp.net project in a single list. That means I get to see all the files even if they are in different folders deep inside. The advantage of a single list is that I can sort them by size or date. Here, the list is reverse sorted on “modified” date. I can see that I changed 6 files today, excluding the cterrors.txt that I know is not a file I changed by hand. Now I can right-click on a file and open its parent folder in explorer. Or, I can even right-click and do the explorer operation copy straight away.
The same concept will apply to any job whether it is web design or managing document collections. If your files are in several folders, the “only files” is going to give you a better picture of the changed or large size files than the regular single-folder file reports.
