Disk space used up – where? when?

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I’ve been searching for years for a simple tool to answer my question:
“Just last week I had 10GB’s open. Where has it disappeared to?”

I have looked at some 20 tools. Many has the most fantastic 3-D graphs and reports on your *current* disk usage.
So you are always on your own trying to find misbehaved applications that wrote tons of garbage to your disk.
It seems there are 100’s of these less useful tools.

I need something to track my disk usage over time (historical changes).
Eventually I found 2 products:

1:
PA WatchDISK (http://www.poweradmin.com/watchdisk/) scans directory structures and stores the sizes of each directory. These stored sizes provide a historical snapshot of your server’s disk space usage on a directory by directory basis. Comparing current sizes to previous sizes allows you to very quickly see which directories have grown and project future disk capacity needs.

PA WatchDISK’s intelligent sorting, simple drill-down user interface, and reports make it easy to quickly find the information you need.

Naturally low disk space alerts haven’t been forgotten. But PA WatchDISK goes one step further: Besides just alerting on low disk space, it can alert you on significant changes in disk space usage as well.

Aimed at network administrators.
45 days trial.
Expensive at $100

2:
DiskSCOUT (http://www.discscout.com/) is not yet-just-another-disk-analyzing-software finding „big“ files on your disk and telling you how “many” MP3s you have —what is wrong with big files anyway… ?
Maybe you have some “big” files on your disk ! And, yes … maybe you have 1,000 MP3s – so what ?
Those files on your hardrive that are taking up the most space are not necessarily wasting your diskspace!
“Big” folders and “big” files are not necessarily the reason why your disk has become full over time – those files may have been on your disk for ages for a good reason.

DiskScout has no eye washing “features” !
Unlike most other disk usage monitors, DiskScout is not designed to find large folders or files, but to mark those where changes in size have occurred between scans

As a home user you will be interested in the development of your “temp files” created by Internet Explorer and Applications, Cookies, c:program files, C:windows… rather than counting your MP3 files…

As an administrator of an enterprise network you will be interested in how the disk space usage of users home-directories on your file server are developing day by day.

DiskSCOUT is especially designed to track this kind of historical development of your hard disk space usage from past to present.
You may scan your disk once an hour, once a day or once a week – everything is saved into a database and changes per folder can be displayed over a range of time periods.

Only 10 days trial.
Only $30
Development seems to have stopped in 2007.

Can you recommend another product?

Ferdi

Reply | Quote

Replies

I’ve been searching for years for a simple tool to answer my question:
“Just last week I had 10GB’s open. Where has it disappeared to?”

I have looked at some 20 tools. Many has the most fantastic 3-D graphs and reports on your *current* disk usage.
So you are always on your own trying to find misbehaved applications that wrote tons of garbage to your disk.
It seems there are 100’s of these less useful tools.

I need something to track my disk usage over time (historical changes).
Eventually I found 2 products:

1:
PA WatchDISK (http://www.poweradmin.com/watchdisk/) scans directory structures and stores the sizes of each directory. These stored sizes provide a historical snapshot of your server’s disk space usage on a directory by directory basis. Comparing current sizes to previous sizes allows you to very quickly see which directories have grown and project future disk capacity needs.

PA WatchDISK’s intelligent sorting, simple drill-down user interface, and reports make it easy to quickly find the information you need.

Naturally low disk space alerts haven’t been forgotten. But PA WatchDISK goes one step further: Besides just alerting on low disk space, it can alert you on significant changes in disk space usage as well.

Aimed at network administrators.
45 days trial.
Expensive at $100

2:
DiskSCOUT (http://www.discscout.com/) is not yet-just-another-disk-analyzing-software finding „big“ files on your disk and telling you how “many” MP3s you have —what is wrong with big files anyway… ?
Maybe you have some “big” files on your disk ! And, yes … maybe you have 1,000 MP3s – so what ?
Those files on your hardrive that are taking up the most space are not necessarily wasting your diskspace!
“Big” folders and “big” files are not necessarily the reason why your disk has become full over time – those files may have been on your disk for ages for a good reason.

DiskScout has no eye washing “features” !
Unlike most other disk usage monitors, DiskScout is not designed to find large folders or files, but to mark those where changes in size have occurred between scans

As a home user you will be interested in the development of your “temp files” created by Internet Explorer and Applications, Cookies, c:program files, C:windows… rather than counting your MP3 files…

As an administrator of an enterprise network you will be interested in how the disk space usage of users home-directories on your file server are developing day by day.

DiskSCOUT is especially designed to track this kind of historical development of your hard disk space usage from past to present.
You may scan your disk once an hour, once a day or once a week – everything is saved into a database and changes per folder can be displayed over a range of time periods.

Only 10 days trial.
Only $30
Development seems to have stopped in 2007.

Can you recommend another product?

Ferdi

Reply | Quote

I’ve been searching for years for a simple tool to answer my question:
“Just last week I had 10GB’s open. Where has it disappeared to?”

I have looked at some 20 tools. Many has the most fantastic 3-D graphs and reports on your *current* disk usage.
So you are always on your own trying to find misbehaved applications that wrote tons of garbage to your disk.
It seems there are 100’s of these less useful tools.

I need something to track my disk usage over time (historical changes).
Eventually I found 2 products:

1:
PA WatchDISK (http://www.poweradmin.com/watchdisk/) scans directory structures and stores the sizes of each directory. These stored sizes provide a historical snapshot of your server’s disk space usage on a directory by directory basis. Comparing current sizes to previous sizes allows you to very quickly see which directories have grown and project future disk capacity needs.

PA WatchDISK’s intelligent sorting, simple drill-down user interface, and reports make it easy to quickly find the information you need.

Naturally low disk space alerts haven’t been forgotten. But PA WatchDISK goes one step further: Besides just alerting on low disk space, it can alert you on significant changes in disk space usage as well.

Aimed at network administrators.
45 days trial.
Expensive at $100

2:
DiskSCOUT (http://www.discscout.com/) is not yet-just-another-disk-analyzing-software finding „big“ files on your disk and telling you how “many” MP3s you have —what is wrong with big files anyway… ?
Maybe you have some “big” files on your disk ! And, yes … maybe you have 1,000 MP3s – so what ?
Those files on your hardrive that are taking up the most space are not necessarily wasting your diskspace!
“Big” folders and “big” files are not necessarily the reason why your disk has become full over time – those files may have been on your disk for ages for a good reason.

DiskScout has no eye washing “features” !
Unlike most other disk usage monitors, DiskScout is not designed to find large folders or files, but to mark those where changes in size have occurred between scans

As a home user you will be interested in the development of your “temp files” created by Internet Explorer and Applications, Cookies, c:program files, C:windows… rather than counting your MP3 files…

As an administrator of an enterprise network you will be interested in how the disk space usage of users home-directories on your file server are developing day by day.

DiskSCOUT is especially designed to track this kind of historical development of your hard disk space usage from past to present.
You may scan your disk once an hour, once a day or once a week – everything is saved into a database and changes per folder can be displayed over a range of time periods.

Only 10 days trial.
Only $30
Development seems to have stopped in 2007.

Can you recommend another product?

Ferdi

Reply | Quote

I’ve been searching for years for a simple tool to answer my question:
“Just last week I had 10GB’s open. Where has it disappeared to?”

I have looked at some 20 tools. Many has the most fantastic 3-D graphs and reports on your *current* disk usage.
So you are always on your own trying to find misbehaved applications that wrote tons of garbage to your disk.
It seems there are 100’s of these less useful tools.

I need something to track my disk usage over time (historical changes).
Eventually I found 2 products:

1:
PA WatchDISK (http://www.poweradmin.com/watchdisk/) scans directory structures and stores the sizes of each directory. These stored sizes provide a historical snapshot of your server’s disk space usage on a directory by directory basis. Comparing current sizes to previous sizes allows you to very quickly see which directories have grown and project future disk capacity needs.

PA WatchDISK’s intelligent sorting, simple drill-down user interface, and reports make it easy to quickly find the information you need.

Naturally low disk space alerts haven’t been forgotten. But PA WatchDISK goes one step further: Besides just alerting on low disk space, it can alert you on significant changes in disk space usage as well.

Aimed at network administrators.
45 days trial.
Expensive at $100

2:
DiskSCOUT (http://www.discscout.com/) is not yet-just-another-disk-analyzing-software finding „big“ files on your disk and telling you how “many” MP3s you have —what is wrong with big files anyway… ?
Maybe you have some “big” files on your disk ! And, yes … maybe you have 1,000 MP3s – so what ?
Those files on your hardrive that are taking up the most space are not necessarily wasting your diskspace!
“Big” folders and “big” files are not necessarily the reason why your disk has become full over time – those files may have been on your disk for ages for a good reason.

DiskScout has no eye washing “features” !
Unlike most other disk usage monitors, DiskScout is not designed to find large folders or files, but to mark those where changes in size have occurred between scans

As a home user you will be interested in the development of your “temp files” created by Internet Explorer and Applications, Cookies, c:program files, C:windows… rather than counting your MP3 files…

As an administrator of an enterprise network you will be interested in how the disk space usage of users home-directories on your file server are developing day by day.

DiskSCOUT is especially designed to track this kind of historical development of your hard disk space usage from past to present.
You may scan your disk once an hour, once a day or once a week – everything is saved into a database and changes per folder can be displayed over a range of time periods.

Only 10 days trial.
Only $30
Development seems to have stopped in 2007.

Can you recommend another product?

Ferdi

Reply | Quote

I’ve been searching for years for a simple tool to answer my question:
“Just last week I had 10GB’s open. Where has it disappeared to?”

I have looked at some 20 tools. Many has the most fantastic 3-D graphs and reports on your *current* disk usage.
So you are always on your own trying to find misbehaved applications that wrote tons of garbage to your disk.
It seems there are 100’s of these less useful tools.

I need something to track my disk usage over time (historical changes).
Eventually I found 2 products:

1:
PA WatchDISK (http://www.poweradmin.com/watchdisk/) scans directory structures and stores the sizes of each directory. These stored sizes provide a historical snapshot of your server’s disk space usage on a directory by directory basis. Comparing current sizes to previous sizes allows you to very quickly see which directories have grown and project future disk capacity needs.

PA WatchDISK’s intelligent sorting, simple drill-down user interface, and reports make it easy to quickly find the information you need.

Naturally low disk space alerts haven’t been forgotten. But PA WatchDISK goes one step further: Besides just alerting on low disk space, it can alert you on significant changes in disk space usage as well.

Aimed at network administrators.
45 days trial.
Expensive at $100

2:
DiskSCOUT (http://www.discscout.com/) is not yet-just-another-disk-analyzing-software finding „big“ files on your disk and telling you how “many” MP3s you have —what is wrong with big files anyway… ?
Maybe you have some “big” files on your disk ! And, yes … maybe you have 1,000 MP3s – so what ?
Those files on your hardrive that are taking up the most space are not necessarily wasting your diskspace!
“Big” folders and “big” files are not necessarily the reason why your disk has become full over time – those files may have been on your disk for ages for a good reason.

DiskScout has no eye washing “features” !
Unlike most other disk usage monitors, DiskScout is not designed to find large folders or files, but to mark those where changes in size have occurred between scans

As a home user you will be interested in the development of your “temp files” created by Internet Explorer and Applications, Cookies, c:program files, C:windows… rather than counting your MP3 files…

As an administrator of an enterprise network you will be interested in how the disk space usage of users home-directories on your file server are developing day by day.

DiskSCOUT is especially designed to track this kind of historical development of your hard disk space usage from past to present.
You may scan your disk once an hour, once a day or once a week – everything is saved into a database and changes per folder can be displayed over a range of time periods.

Only 10 days trial.
Only $30
Development seems to have stopped in 2007.

Can you recommend another product?

Ferdi

Reply | Quote

I’ve been searching for years for a simple tool to answer my question:
“Just last week I had 10GB’s open. Where has it disappeared to?”

I have looked at some 20 tools. Many has the most fantastic 3-D graphs and reports on your *current* disk usage.
So you are always on your own trying to find misbehaved applications that wrote tons of garbage to your disk.
It seems there are 100’s of these less useful tools.

I need something to track my disk usage over time (historical changes).
Eventually I found 2 products:

1:
PA WatchDISK (http://www.poweradmin.com/watchdisk/) scans directory structures and stores the sizes of each directory. These stored sizes provide a historical snapshot of your server’s disk space usage on a directory by directory basis. Comparing current sizes to previous sizes allows you to very quickly see which directories have grown and project future disk capacity needs.

PA WatchDISK’s intelligent sorting, simple drill-down user interface, and reports make it easy to quickly find the information you need.

Naturally low disk space alerts haven’t been forgotten. But PA WatchDISK goes one step further: Besides just alerting on low disk space, it can alert you on significant changes in disk space usage as well.

Aimed at network administrators.
45 days trial.
Expensive at $100

2:
DiskSCOUT (http://www.discscout.com/) is not yet-just-another-disk-analyzing-software finding „big“ files on your disk and telling you how “many” MP3s you have —what is wrong with big files anyway… ?
Maybe you have some “big” files on your disk ! And, yes … maybe you have 1,000 MP3s – so what ?
Those files on your hardrive that are taking up the most space are not necessarily wasting your diskspace!
“Big” folders and “big” files are not necessarily the reason why your disk has become full over time – those files may have been on your disk for ages for a good reason.

DiskScout has no eye washing “features” !
Unlike most other disk usage monitors, DiskScout is not designed to find large folders or files, but to mark those where changes in size have occurred between scans

As a home user you will be interested in the development of your “temp files” created by Internet Explorer and Applications, Cookies, c:program files, C:windows… rather than counting your MP3 files…

As an administrator of an enterprise network you will be interested in how the disk space usage of users home-directories on your file server are developing day by day.

DiskSCOUT is especially designed to track this kind of historical development of your hard disk space usage from past to present.
You may scan your disk once an hour, once a day or once a week – everything is saved into a database and changes per folder can be displayed over a range of time periods.

Only 10 days trial.
Only $30
Development seems to have stopped in 2007.

Can you recommend another product?

Ferdi

Reply | Quote

I’ve been searching for years for a simple tool to answer my question:
“Just last week I had 10GB’s open. Where has it disappeared to?”

I have looked at some 20 tools. Many has the most fantastic 3-D graphs and reports on your *current* disk usage.
So you are always on your own trying to find misbehaved applications that wrote tons of garbage to your disk.
It seems there are 100’s of these less useful tools.

I need something to track my disk usage over time (historical changes).
Eventually I found 2 products:

1:
PA WatchDISK (http://www.poweradmin.com/watchdisk/) scans directory structures and stores the sizes of each directory. These stored sizes provide a historical snapshot of your server’s disk space usage on a directory by directory basis. Comparing current sizes to previous sizes allows you to very quickly see which directories have grown and project future disk capacity needs.

PA WatchDISK’s intelligent sorting, simple drill-down user interface, and reports make it easy to quickly find the information you need.

Naturally low disk space alerts haven’t been forgotten. But PA WatchDISK goes one step further: Besides just alerting on low disk space, it can alert you on significant changes in disk space usage as well.

Aimed at network administrators.
45 days trial.
Expensive at $100

2:
DiskSCOUT (http://www.discscout.com/) is not yet-just-another-disk-analyzing-software finding „big“ files on your disk and telling you how “many” MP3s you have —what is wrong with big files anyway… ?
Maybe you have some “big” files on your disk ! And, yes … maybe you have 1,000 MP3s – so what ?
Those files on your hardrive that are taking up the most space are not necessarily wasting your diskspace!
“Big” folders and “big” files are not necessarily the reason why your disk has become full over time – those files may have been on your disk for ages for a good reason.

DiskScout has no eye washing “features” !
Unlike most other disk usage monitors, DiskScout is not designed to find large folders or files, but to mark those where changes in size have occurred between scans

As a home user you will be interested in the development of your “temp files” created by Internet Explorer and Applications, Cookies, c:program files, C:windows… rather than counting your MP3 files…

As an administrator of an enterprise network you will be interested in how the disk space usage of users home-directories on your file server are developing day by day.

DiskSCOUT is especially designed to track this kind of historical development of your hard disk space usage from past to present.
You may scan your disk once an hour, once a day or once a week – everything is saved into a database and changes per folder can be displayed over a range of time periods.

Only 10 days trial.
Only $30
Development seems to have stopped in 2007.

Can you recommend another product?

Ferdi

Reply | Quote

I’ve been searching for years for a simple tool to answer my question:
“Just last week I had 10GB’s open. Where has it disappeared to?”

I have looked at some 20 tools. Many has the most fantastic 3-D graphs and reports on your *current* disk usage.
So you are always on your own trying to find misbehaved applications that wrote tons of garbage to your disk.
It seems there are 100’s of these less useful tools.

I need something to track my disk usage over time (historical changes).
Eventually I found 2 products:

1:
PA WatchDISK (http://www.poweradmin.com/watchdisk/) scans directory structures and stores the sizes of each directory. These stored sizes provide a historical snapshot of your server’s disk space usage on a directory by directory basis. Comparing current sizes to previous sizes allows you to very quickly see which directories have grown and project future disk capacity needs.

PA WatchDISK’s intelligent sorting, simple drill-down user interface, and reports make it easy to quickly find the information you need.

Naturally low disk space alerts haven’t been forgotten. But PA WatchDISK goes one step further: Besides just alerting on low disk space, it can alert you on significant changes in disk space usage as well.

Aimed at network administrators.
45 days trial.
Expensive at $100

2:
DiskSCOUT (http://www.discscout.com/) is not yet-just-another-disk-analyzing-software finding „big“ files on your disk and telling you how “many” MP3s you have —what is wrong with big files anyway… ?
Maybe you have some “big” files on your disk ! And, yes … maybe you have 1,000 MP3s – so what ?
Those files on your hardrive that are taking up the most space are not necessarily wasting your diskspace!
“Big” folders and “big” files are not necessarily the reason why your disk has become full over time – those files may have been on your disk for ages for a good reason.

DiskScout has no eye washing “features” !
Unlike most other disk usage monitors, DiskScout is not designed to find large folders or files, but to mark those where changes in size have occurred between scans

As a home user you will be interested in the development of your “temp files” created by Internet Explorer and Applications, Cookies, c:program files, C:windows… rather than counting your MP3 files…

As an administrator of an enterprise network you will be interested in how the disk space usage of users home-directories on your file server are developing day by day.

DiskSCOUT is especially designed to track this kind of historical development of your hard disk space usage from past to present.
You may scan your disk once an hour, once a day or once a week – everything is saved into a database and changes per folder can be displayed over a range of time periods.

Only 10 days trial.
Only $30
Development seems to have stopped in 2007.

Can you recommend another product?

Ferdi

Reply | Quote

Can you recommend another product?

Yes, TreeSize Free[/url]. It’s free, and it displays the size of your directory tree. And enables you to see how much space is occupied by the files in each directory. If you like it you can buy the Professional version…

It doesn’t display things ‘over time’, but you can save the output from each run and compare. I would have thought that
a) you will only be interested in the larger directories, and frequent inspection will give you a feeling for these
b) quite often it’s Windows stacking up files in specific directories (but that’s another thread)
c) why worry, anyway? Disk space is now almost infinite!

(If you’re quite young, replace the word ‘directory’ by ‘folder’, throughout )

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

Reply | Quote

Can you recommend another product?

Yes, TreeSize Free[/url]. It’s free, and it displays the size of your directory tree. And enables you to see how much space is occupied by the files in each directory. If you like it you can buy the Professional version…

It doesn’t display things ‘over time’, but you can save the output from each run and compare. I would have thought that
a) you will only be interested in the larger directories, and frequent inspection will give you a feeling for these
b) quite often it’s Windows stacking up files in specific directories (but that’s another thread)
c) why worry, anyway? Disk space is now almost infinite!

(If you’re quite young, replace the word ‘directory’ by ‘folder’, throughout )

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

Reply | Quote

Can you recommend another product?

Yes, TreeSize Free[/url]. It’s free, and it displays the size of your directory tree. And enables you to see how much space is occupied by the files in each directory. If you like it you can buy the Professional version…

It doesn’t display things ‘over time’, but you can save the output from each run and compare. I would have thought that
a) you will only be interested in the larger directories, and frequent inspection will give you a feeling for these
b) quite often it’s Windows stacking up files in specific directories (but that’s another thread)
c) why worry, anyway? Disk space is now almost infinite!

(If you’re quite young, replace the word ‘directory’ by ‘folder’, throughout )

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

Reply | Quote

Can you recommend another product?

Yes, TreeSize Free[/url]. It’s free, and it displays the size of your directory tree. And enables you to see how much space is occupied by the files in each directory. If you like it you can buy the Professional version…

It doesn’t display things ‘over time’, but you can save the output from each run and compare. I would have thought that
a) you will only be interested in the larger directories, and frequent inspection will give you a feeling for these
b) quite often it’s Windows stacking up files in specific directories (but that’s another thread)
c) why worry, anyway? Disk space is now almost infinite!

(If you’re quite young, replace the word ‘directory’ by ‘folder’, throughout )

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

Reply | Quote

Can you recommend another product?

Yes, TreeSize Free[/url]. It’s free, and it displays the size of your directory tree. And enables you to see how much space is occupied by the files in each directory. If you like it you can buy the Professional version…

It doesn’t display things ‘over time’, but you can save the output from each run and compare. I would have thought that
a) you will only be interested in the larger directories, and frequent inspection will give you a feeling for these
b) quite often it’s Windows stacking up files in specific directories (but that’s another thread)
c) why worry, anyway? Disk space is now almost infinite!

(If you’re quite young, replace the word ‘directory’ by ‘folder’, throughout )

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

Reply | Quote

Can you recommend another product?

Yes, TreeSize Free[/url]. It’s free, and it displays the size of your directory tree. And enables you to see how much space is occupied by the files in each directory. If you like it you can buy the Professional version…

It doesn’t display things ‘over time’, but you can save the output from each run and compare. I would have thought that
a) you will only be interested in the larger directories, and frequent inspection will give you a feeling for these
b) quite often it’s Windows stacking up files in specific directories (but that’s another thread)
c) why worry, anyway? Disk space is now almost infinite!

(If you’re quite young, replace the word ‘directory’ by ‘folder’, throughout )

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

Reply | Quote

Can you recommend another product?

Yes, TreeSize Free[/url]. It’s free, and it displays the size of your directory tree. And enables you to see how much space is occupied by the files in each directory. If you like it you can buy the Professional version…

It doesn’t display things ‘over time’, but you can save the output from each run and compare. I would have thought that
a) you will only be interested in the larger directories, and frequent inspection will give you a feeling for these
b) quite often it’s Windows stacking up files in specific directories (but that’s another thread)
c) why worry, anyway? Disk space is now almost infinite!

(If you’re quite young, replace the word ‘directory’ by ‘folder’, throughout )

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

Reply | Quote

Can you recommend another product?

Yes, TreeSize Free[/url]. It’s free, and it displays the size of your directory tree. And enables you to see how much space is occupied by the files in each directory. If you like it you can buy the Professional version…

It doesn’t display things ‘over time’, but you can save the output from each run and compare. I would have thought that
a) you will only be interested in the larger directories, and frequent inspection will give you a feeling for these
b) quite often it’s Windows stacking up files in specific directories (but that’s another thread)
c) why worry, anyway? Disk space is now almost infinite!

(If you’re quite young, replace the word ‘directory’ by ‘folder’, throughout )

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

Reply | Quote

Did BATcher suggest Treesize Free? It’s the one I use on the servers at work – I actually prefer Treesize Pro, but we are having a recession you know!

cheers, Paul

Reply | Quote

I use WinDirStat – gives a nice graphic of the disk usage – though it did take me a while to get used to it, it packs a lot of information into a single graphical display.

Then there is always the diruse tool from the old resource kits…

Reply | Quote

BATcher, I’m old enough to know 10 commandline options for dir – and how to pipe it to grep.
That was until Norton Commander spoilt me.

Now I don’t want to know/remember what sizes for what folders are reasonable.
I only want to check free disk space – and if there’s an alarm then I want to know what has happened without jumping thru all kinds of hoops.

It seems TreeSize, WinDirStat and diruse lacks the history function.

Reply | Quote

Now I don’t want to know/remember what sizes for what folders are reasonable.
I only want to check free disk space – and if there’s an alarm then I want to know what has happened without jumping thru all kinds of hoops..

Looks like you absolutely need Space ObServer – just $260.

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

Reply | Quote

Treesize Pro allows you to create daily reports.

cheers, Paul

Reply | Quote