FolderSizes Help

The Disk Reporter tool allows you to view disk space consumption across multiple local and remote systems within a single report.

 

Use the Add Disks toolbar button to get started. The following options are available:

 

•Local Disks - Offers a range of options for adding or selecting local system disks (including mapped drives) to the current report.

•Discover Network Shares - Allows for discovery of shares on the network, either on specific computers or an entire workgroup/domain. See the Network Share Discovery help topic for more information.

•Enter Path(s) Manually - Use this option if you wish to enter one or more file system paths (a local disk or UNC path, for example) manually.

 

Important Note on Disk Paths

 

When adding network shares in UNC (e.g. \\server\share) format, keep in mind that disk space utilization is always reported for the root drive associated with that share. For example, if you add a UNC path of "\\server\share\myfolder", disk space metrics will be provided for that share's root drive (and not for the "myfolder" folder). Therefore, multiple share paths that resolve to the same physical disk drive will all reveal the same information and metrics when added to a disk report.

 

In other words, the Disk Reporter specifically reports on disks - not folders.

 

Viewing Disk History

 

Whenever FolderSizes queries a disk for information about available space, it stores those resulting metrics in a historical database. This data can then be used to provide trend reports.

 

To view historical data for a specific disk, double-click it within the Disk Reporter window. The Disk History window will appear, providing both graph and detail views of each historical entry.

 

The Disk Reporter also provides a "% Growth" column that is calculated using available historical information for each disk.

 

For more information, please see the About Disk History help topic.

 

Loading and Saving

 

You can use the Load Disks and Save Disks toolbar buttons to load or save a specific disk report layout. The resulting text file contains a listing of the disk drives involved in the report, and can be used by the command line and task scheduler interfaces to generate disk reports on a periodic basis.

 

The Disk Reporter will also automatically save the current disk space report to a default file system location, and then restore the contents of that report during subsequent uses.

 

Customizing the Report Display

 

By default, the Disk Reporter will group disks by their type (e.g. local disk, remote disk, network share, etc.).

 

You can, however, customize the grouping (or remove it entirely) by clicking the View toolbar button and selecting Show Group Bar. This will cause the group header area to become visible. You can then drag and drop report columns to and from the group header area as needed.

 

You can also determine which report columns are visible by right-clicking any report column header and selecting/deselecting columns in the resulting pop-up menu. The same pop-up menu can be used to change column alignment, auto-size columns, etc.

 

The order of columns can be changed by simply dragging and dropping report column headers into the order of your preference.

 

Note that any changes made to report formatting (such as grouping, column visibility, etc.) will be applied to all disk reports created in the future.

 

Other Functions

 

Other Disk Reporter functions are accessible via the toolbar:

 

•Remove - Removes the currently selected disk from the report.

•Refresh - Refreshes disk space information for all drives in the current report.

•Export - Allows report data to be exported in a number of file formats.

•Help - Shows help information for the Disk Reporter.