Best method to track folder size growth over time?

Question

I have a file server that has a pretty large folder tree. There's a shared folder, under that are 5 departmental folders. Nested inside of those are thousands of subfolders and files.

I would like to be able to trace growth of those 5 departmental folders. There are certain particular sub-sub-sub folders I'd also like to keep an eye on. This is so that, if I suddenly see my disk utilization % skyrocket, I can have a clue as to what folder this growth happened in, so I can drill down and discover whodunnit.

I thought about writing some sort of vb or powershell script (which would require learning the lang) to do a DU of each folder and then write out a table to a file or something. But I'm thinking this is reinventing the wheel because somebody has to have solved this before. Is anyone aware of a (hopefully freeware/OSS) solution to graphing various folders in a filesystem?

Solution 1

WatchDISK does exactly that -- shows directory sizes over time. WatchDISK's big brother, PA Storage Monitor does that plus more (besides tracking just directory sizes, it can tell you who the largest storage users are, where the MP3s are, etc).

Solution 2

take a look at Corner Bowl disk monitor : http://www.diskmonitor.com/ not free but completely configurable to your needs, reasonable price you can try 20 days for free.

Solution 3

FolderSizes would do the job as well.

http://www.foldersizes.com/

Comments

[joeqwerty]

Disk quotas aren't really a method for tracking the growth of folders. Disk quotas are a method of controlling the usage of volumes (W2K3) or volumes and\or folders (W2K3R2, W2K8).

[Aszurom]

Link to download that is a 404. Must not be avail or correctly linked on his site. Looks like a good CLI means of dumping that info to a txt file to parse later with a script though.

[Aszurom]

Is quota good for more than just doing a conditional threshold notification setup? Like, does it track space used over time or just notification when the space used reaches a set point?

[Mircea Vutcovici]

The purpose of quota is to limit the space used by an user or by the content of a folder. You can use the "soft" limit as a warning.

[Ward - Reinstate Monica]

Change the path on the exe download to match the source download, i.e., use: dev.carl-thomas.net/Utils/TreeSize/TreeSize.zip

[Aszurom]

I'll call this the accepted answer, because this software does exactly what I asked. Costs a bit, but gets it done.

[chukko]

The domain is not used anymore - valid URL is cornerbowlsoftware.com/DiskMonitor now.