Disk Usage Analyser by Glenn Delahoy (C) Copyright 2004-2005 All rights reserved Description ----------- Ever wondered what's using up so much space on your hard disk? Disk Usage Analyser will help you find out. This tool provides a familiar Windows Explorer view of your system which includes the size, space used, slack space and file count of each folder including sub folders. It displays a pie chart or bar chart of the selected folder highlighting the big folders or files. Use the explorer or charts to find those big files or the wasted space. The display updates automatically following any file system changes making it a simple and effective monitoring tool. Includes file filters, customisable html reports, save chart to jpg tool, shell extension tools to build a shortcut collection for quick access to frequented folders and to quickly analyse a folder from Windows Explorer. Works with all local fixed and removable drives as well as remote network drives and mapped drives. Startup ------- Disk Usage Analyser always starts with folder size calculation switched off. This avoids the potential problem of a lot of files causing an "out of memory" error and making it unusable. You can switch on folder size calculation any time by selecting the "Folder Sizes" button on the toolbar. Explorer -------- Using the application is straight forward and intuitive. If you're comfortable with Windows Explorer you'll have no trouble here. The explorer right click menu is fully functional. Most function keys operate as expected with the two exceptions I've found: the Delete key doesn't work, you have to select Delete from the context menu. If you hold down the Shift key the selected files are completely deleted, otherwise the files will go to the Recycle Bin. Ctrl-A for Select All doesn't work, you have to use Shift-End or Ctrl click the required files. There are three size columns listed: the first is the actual size of the files, the second is space used by the files on the disk (i.e. the size of all clusters used by the files) and the third is the space wasted and unusable by the files (i.e. size of all used clusters minus the size of the files). You'll notice that most wastage is caused by a folder full of small files. There's also a Count column indicating the total number of files in each folder and all its sub-folders. File Filter ----------- The filter control on the toolbar controls the displayed files and also the files included in the folder size calculations. You can select from the drop down list or type in your own filter. Any new filters you type in are added to the drop down list and saved to the DiskAnalyser.ini file for future use. This is a great way of quickly finding files of a particular type. Display ------- The three main panels can be toggled on and off using the toolbar buttons and the X buttons on each panel. Other toolbar buttons allow the chart style to be toggled between Pie and Bar, the chart contents to be toggled between folders and file types and the chart legend toggled on and off. Charts ------ The pie and bar charts and the chart legend are all clickable so you can click directly on the folder in the chart to drill down into it. When you reach a folder with no sub-folders, the chart contents automatically switches to file types and no further clicking is possible. You can also right click any data point on the bar chart, pie chart and the legend to pop up the Windows context menu. There are four types of chart: pie, 3d pie, bar and 3d bar. Click the button on the toolbar to cycle between them or click the arrow next to the toolbar button to select one. You can save the chart to a jpg file from the toolbar button. Reports ------- Click the Print button to generate a HTML report for the current folder. The contents of the report depends on what is on the screen at the time. For example, the Volume section will only appear on the report if the Volume panel is visible on the screen. The chart will only appear if it is visible on the screen and the folder/file information will only appear if the explorer is visible on the screen. This gives you a simple way of customising the report to contain the information you want. The size of the chart on the report can be adjusted by resizing the chart on the screen. Alternatively, click the down arrow on the Print button to get a list of print options. The first option is the standard report for the current folder. The second option saves the current folder information to a csv text file suitable for importing into a spreadsheet. The third option prints the contents of all sub-folders. Be careful with this, if there's too many files, the report can get very big and will take a long time to load into your web browser (it may look like it's stalled). The fourth option saves the contents of all sub-folders to a csv text file. The files included in the reports are controlled by the file filter on the toolbar. The report is loaded and displayed by your default web browser application and can be printed from there. Shell Extension --------------- Disk Usage Analyser includes a Windows shell extension tool which adds options to the Windows Explorer right click context menu. To enable the extension, click the Registry button on the toolbar. This will registry the shell extension with Windows and several DUA options will appear on the Explorer right click context menu. These options are also available within the DUA explorer. To unregister the shell extension click the down arrow next to the registry button to drop down the menu, then select the Unregister option. The following options are added to the Explorer context menu: Analyse Folder -------------- When this option is selected, Disk Usage Analyser starts and immediately jumps to the selected folder. Add Shortcut To Disk Analyser ----------------------------- When this option is selected, a shortcut to the selected folder is created in DUAs private collection of shortcuts (which is a sub-folder of the application's folder). To see the collection of shortcuts, click the shortcut button on the DUA toolbar. The explorer jumps to the shortcut collection folder. From here you can double click a shortcut to jump to the target folder or you can modify, rename or delete the shortcuts in the normal manner. If you then click the shortcut button a second time (so that it's in the up position) the explorer will return to the folder from whence it came. The packaged *.reg files are no longer used but I've left them in case you're interested in the registry entries it creates. Performance ----------- Keep in mind that the calculating the size of a whole system can take a while as Disk Analyser recursively calculates the size of each drive and all sub folders. However after this initial hit, the information is cached internally and the speed is then quite fast. File Sizes vs Disk Used ----------------------- Remember that the sum of the file sizes is not going to add up to the space occupied by those files. The Used figure for a given disk, folder or file will always be greater than the total Size. The Slack figures will give a clue. Usually a lot of small files will take up more disk space than a few big files. Uninstalling ------------ Disk Usage Analyser doesn't place an entry in your Windows uninstall list. To remove it from your system take the following steps: 1. Start Disk Usage Analyser, click the down arrow next to the registry icon on the toolbar and select Unregister Shell Extension and close the program. This unregisters the shell extension and removes the shell extension entries from the registry. 2. Open Windows Explorer, navigate to your "C:\Program Files" folder and delete the DiskAnalyser folder. 3. Open your Start menu, navigate to the Programs folder and delete the Disk Usage Analyser folder. No files are installed anywhere else. Known Issues ------------ Disk Usage Analyser seems to have trouble reading some Samba drives. If you encounter such a problem you can work around it by creating a Windows mapped network drive. -------------------------------------------------------------- Release Notes ------------- Version 1.10 ------------ Change 1: Added option to chart file types. Change 2: Some code clean up. Version 1.20 ------------ Change 1: Added right click Windows context menu to charts and legend. Change 2: Added html report. Change 3: Added save chart to jpg tool. Change 4: Fixed a point of excessive refreshes. Change 5: Replaced main menu with toolbar. Change 6: Added progress display. Change 7: Added support for shortcuts in explorer control. Change 8: Added shortcuts collection and shell extension. Change 9: Fixed panel toggles for more independance. Change 10: Added option to toggle on and off the folder size calculations. Change 11: Added status leds to volume list. Version 1.30 ------------ Change 1: Added filter tool. Change 2: Added Analyse Folder option to shell extension tool. Change 3: Added file type to report. Change 4: Added option to print all sub-folders in report. Change 5: Added option to save report to csv format file. Change 6: Added 3d chart options. Version 1.40 ------------ Change 1: Someone mentioned that they need to have a floppy in the drive in order for Disk Analyser to work. I can't reproduce this but I've added some extra checks to the disk detection before attempting to read the drive. Change 2: Folder information is now being cached in memory. Initial hit is still there but after that navigation is very fast. When a change is detected the relevant folders are recalculated or when the filter is changed, the current folder is recalculated. Change 3: Added extra detail columns to My Computer list. Change 4: Fixed column discrepencies in Recycle Bin. Change 5: Fixed bug with files with no extensions. Change 6: Fixed bug with hidden directories. Change 7: Fixed bug with files greater than 1GB in size. Change 8: Added Used, Slack and Files columns. Change 9: Added cluster size to volume summary. Change 10: Added registry options to toolbar. Shell extension is no longer automatically registered on startup. Change 11: Added cute splash screen. Change 12: Added options to chart slack space and file count. Version 1.41 ------------ Change 1: Folder sizes is now off by default. Change 2: Internal folder info array is packed to reduce memory requirements. Change 3: Stomped on a couple of AVs. Change 4: Trapping file paths with no drive (network shares). Change 5: Reduce hits on empty drives. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Comments/suggestions to: support@delahoy.com http://www.glenn.delahoy.com