FOLDER SIZE REPORTING

One question that we receive from our customers on a fairly regular basis is “How can we produce a listing of all the folders (or files) in a specific directory?” Often the customer will also want to print and/or export said listing.

This is a perfect job for the FolderSizes Search tool. In fact, FolderSizes can product a “flat” (non-hierarchical) list of files and/or folders that includes a considerable amount of useful information – far more than what is exposed by other software utilities. For example, creating a list of folders will yield their size, allocated size (e.g. “size on disk), owner, attributes, path and name lengths, folder depth, and much more.

Not only does FolderSizes Search produce detailed results, but those results can be exported, printed, and even managed (copied, deleted, or archived) directly from within the tool. You can schedule production of said reports, as well as load and save them as needed. You can also search multiple local and/or network file systems in a single pass.

So let’s walk through a simple example of how to use FolderSizes Search in this capacity. Let’s say we want to list all the image files in a specific directory.

1. Click the Search button in the main window ribbon bar
2. On the Search Paths tab, click the New Path button and browse for the folder you wish to search
3. Switch to the Search Rules tab and click the New Rule button, then select New File Rule
4. Optionally give the rule a useful name (it will named something like “Rule #1” by default)
5. In the Name tab of the file rule editor, click the Presets button and select Images
6. Click OK to save the rule

At this point we have a single file rule configured to match the file extensions of a wide range of image file types and we simply need to run the Search by clicking the Start button. Results will begin to appear as soon as they’re available.

Of course, this is just the beginning in terms of what’s possible. You can also create folder rules, with criteria designed to match specific folders (rather than files) – or you can use a combination of the two. File and folder rules can match a wide range of criteria such as name (as we saw in our example above), attributes, size, name or path length, age, owner, folder depth, and more.

In summary, the Search tool is very versatile and can produce folder/file listings that include many of the critical report attributes (such as size and allocates size) that you expect from FolderSizes. If you have any questions about how to achieve a specific goal, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us – we’re happy to help.