FOLDER SIZE REPORTING

Key Metric Software has now sold more than ten thousand unique FolderSizes product licenses.

And the actual user count is much higher. Why? Because we have numerous large enterprise customers, such as ExxonMobil and Chevron (just two examples), who have worldwide license contracts with many, many individual users. What’s more, a large percentage of our license sales are for multi-user “license packs” and site-wide licenses (even though we only count these as one license sale).

Why has FolderSizes become so pervasive? Because regardless of how many cheap clones and open-source freebies (with a fraction of the features) appear on the market, FolderSizes is the obvious “professional grade” choice for businesses. Not only does FolderSizes support advanced functionality not available in other solutions, it’s also backed by a software company that’s deeply committed to customer satisfaction. As other disk space visualization and management tools have come and gone, FolderSizes continues to be developed and vigorously supported.

When you (or your company) licenses FolderSizes, you’re ensuring the continuity of the best disk space analysis and management software tool on the market today.

And you know what – we’re not slowing down. More about the next major release of FolderSizes in a future blog.

A lot of people use FolderSizes for its integrated search facility, which we’ve engineered from the ground up to be super-flexible. You can get answers to a vast number of data storage questions using FolderSizes search, and one of the most popular questions is – where are my empty folders?

Of course, with FolderSizes you can find empty folders not only on your local computer file system, but on any file system accessible to FolderSizes (including other machines accessible via your local area network, etc.).

For up-to-date info, please see how to search for empty directories with FolderSizes.

Here at KeyMetric Software, we have a deep and ongoing commitment to releasing safe and secure software products to our customers. For example, our flagship software product – FolderSizes – is in use by many thousands of organizations and individuals across the globe, and we take seriously our responsibility to ensure the security of those product installations.

Toward this end, here are the most recent results of our comprehensive anti-virus scanning process (performed against the latest publicly available build of FolderSizes):

Note: a virus scan result of “-” means that the anti-virus product detected no threats.

FolderSizes v4.7 is now available for download.

As I discussed in a recent blog entry, this new release provides a fascinating new way to view hierarchical folder structures – the folder map. We’re extremely excited about this capability, as we believe this is a best-in-class implementation of a very modern data visualization technique known as treemapping.

Version 4.7 of FolderSizes also introduces a new license type – the personal edition license – designed specifically for home users (and priced accordingly at only $25.00 USD). There are a few functional limitations (described in detail here) in the personal edition of FolderSizes, and it cannot be used in any business or organizational environment. But for folks needing a disk space analysis tool for home / personal use, this new license type should be very welcome. In fact, users have been asking us for this for quite some time.

Additional information about v4.7 can found in the online release notes.

Let’s talk about what we’ve been working on for our upcoming FolderSizes v4.6 release.

First and foremost, v4.6 contains a new integrated scheduling facility. With this tool, you can schedule the execution of any FolderSizes report type and export those results in a variety of formats. Here in our development labs, we’ve scheduled the generation of all of FolderSizes’ various report types, exporting each of them (in HTML format) to a shared folder on our network (effectively building an archive of data storage reports that speed and simplify storage hotspot identification, as well as providing historical context).

The next major focus of FolderSizes v4.6 is performance. Nearly every feature has received a comprehensive performance and resource usage evaluation, and this has process resulted in:

• The introduction of a new file owner data lookup cache
• Numerous improvements to our folder analysis data caching technology
• A nearly 60% memory usage reduction in many file report scan scenarios
• Numerous performance boosts when scanning remote (network) paths
• New options that provide more granular control over scan-time performance

Some of these improvements might sound a bit technical and geeky – but believe me, they amount to a serious performance and resource usage improvement in v4.6.

There are tons of other improvements as well – improved visual theme switching, “filename only” duplicate file matching, a greatly improved duplicate file report HTML export format, a new “allocated” column in several of the file reporting detail views, and much more. We also threw in a handful of bug fixes for good measure.

FolderSizes v4.6 is a free upgrade for existing v4 license holders. Get yours now – fresh off the compiler.