FOLDER SIZE REPORTING

FolderSizes provides robust support for long NTFS file system paths. In this article, I’ll discuss how to you can search for long NTFS paths using FolderSizes. Spoiler alert – it’s incredibly easy.

First, start FolderSizes and click the Search button in the main window ribbon bar. The Search window will appear.

Click the Search Paths tab and enter as many paths as you wish to search. This can be any combination of local and network paths.

Once you’ve defined the paths that you’d like to search, click the Samples button in the Search window toolbar. Here you’ll be able to choose from a number of built-in search samples that FolderSizes provides out of the box. In this case, select the one named “Find Long File and Folder Paths.xml”.

After the sample is loaded, the Search Rules tab will automatically be selected so you can review the associated rules. In this case, you’ll see two predefined rules – one for files, and one for folders (since we’re interested in finding both). Let’s double-click the file rule to review its criteria:

As you can see from the screenshot above, the Name Len tab of the file rule editor specifies is configured to match paths with more than 255 characters in them. Also note that the Count the full path length option is selected (without this, only the length of the file name would be considered when evaluating the rule).

Close the File Rule Editor window and click Start in the Search window to execute the search. Upon completion, you’ll be presented with a full list of files and folders with paths exceeding a length of 255 characters. This allows you to review the size, allocated size (e.g. “size on disk”), and much more (right-click the search result listing column header to customize the report).

So there you have it, a quick and easy-to-use means of finding long NTFS file system paths. Very handy considering that a number of programs and systems are unable to process long file system paths correctly.