Yesterday we got an alert from a client’s server that it was a running low on disk space.
This particular server has a data partition that is about 44GB but in the past they have never got anywhere near this much data
I logged onto the server and yes indeed they were pretty low on space. I did a bit of house keeping and deleted some old backup/image files on the server to free up about 7GB
While I was looking at the folders something didn’t quite add up
I selected all the folders and checked the properties and the size totaled to about 9GB.
Strange. The server was reporting 35GB had been used.
I’d come across a similar probably in the past where you have to allow for the space used by shadow copies but on checking this it was only using about 2GB…where had the other 25GB gone?
I’ve used TreeSize Free a couple of times in the past and this told the same story (just in a nice graphical fashion!)
So I did a bit of searching and found the DIRUSE utility and used the following
DIRUSE /s /m /, E:\ > c:\sizelog.txt
This gave me a text file with a complete a list of every folder on the partition with usage in megabytes with larger figures nicely separated by a comma
I was able to open the file in excel and sort by the file size with the largest at the top
I spotted a couple of subdirectories that were quite large where Treesize and Explorer had reported the containing folder as being quite small
The name of the folder gave it away for me: PROFILES
On this particular server each user has a roaming profile so they can log onto any PC in the office.
But the way this had been setup meant that as an administrator, by default I didn’t have permission to view those files…even to check the file size
When your logged on as an administrator DIRUSE gives you the file sizes regardless of permissions and surprise, surprise the profiles directory was 25GB
Looking down the list the it turns out that someone must of had this bright idea,
“I’ll install iTunes and rip some music to the PC, that way I can listen to music no matter which PC i’m on”
Then everyone else had caught on to the idea and the re-directed My Documents folders were full of MP3’s
There was a little while where this had me completely stumped and all sorts of ideas running through my head about file corruption and similar nightmares. Thankfully it wasn’t anything of the sort but i learnt all about a very useful command!
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