Alternative to windirstat?

We’ve used windirstat for a long time when investigating why server or desktop hard drives suddenly fill up. It’s a very quick way of finding out who has just synched their ipod to the server network share.  Earlier this week though we found that it was reporting a drive had 40gb used out of 115gb yet the OS was showing 2gb free. Obviously this is a rather large discrepency and was the second time we’d had windirstat not match the information that Windows was reporting.  After a bit of digging around, I checked the volume shadow copy settings, set it back to a more reasonable 10gb instead of 99.2% of the disk and our free space went back to about 70gb in windows – now matching what windirstat was reporting.

So it looks like windirstat does not take into account files such as the VSS cache location.

So we’re looking around for an alternative – I’d really like it to be a standalone application – if you know of anything then please add something in the comments and I’ll add a new post with my preferred solution.

Comments

  1. Andy Helsby

    Thanks Andrew – I’ve contacted them this morning to see what they have to say. Ron – thanks for the suggestion – I couldn’t remember the name of that program – that was it. I also tried jdisk (requires java) but it took forever to scan, needs java and the interface for the results was not as useful for me.

  2. Post
    Author
    Andy

    Yes it claims to be faster but it’s not free. Although it does more things than Windirstat, most of the things it does are not really what this tool would be used for. Personally I think the coloured squares aren’t really confusing and give a nice quick visual clue as to the relative sizes – great when presenting disk space usage to clients who do not understand the difference between Mb’s and Gb’s but understand when 50% of a server’s hard drive is taken up with a users movie or mp3 collection. Thanks for the feedback though.

  3. binaryman

    When Directory Report is run as an administrator
    It will find your drive’s hidden files
    These hidden files are probably the cause of your discrepancy
    Make sure you run the latest version 36 of Directory Report

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