How can I monitor disk usage / growth on Windows Server 2008

Question

I would like to monitor the file growth on my server, I want to be able to see how much data is being taken up over time. This way I can calculate when to upgrade disk space or budget for new equipment based on data usage.

Thanks for your help.

Solution

There are a huge number of ways you could do this, all dependent on how much infrastructure you want to plumb versus doing things manually:

• Periodically run a directory listing on the volume in question and annotate the free space in a spreadsheet. Subtract the free space from the total volume size to get the allocated space. (Not necessarily the file size, though, because using this method the on-disk size of compressed files would be reflected.)

• Write a script to periodically gather this information (using built-in tools like dir or chkdsk or perfmon or WMI, or any of a vast number of other built-in or 3rd party tools) and store in a spreadsheet, database, etc.

• As @tombull89 says, use File Server Resource Manager to generate reports. Slice/dice that data to get the trending information you need.

• Take the output from your backup software for the server in question and either manually for via script slice/dice the data. (I tend to do this because I'm more interested in the raw size of the data, irrespective of NTFS compression.) Depending on your backup software you may already have a treasure-trove of historical data here to "mine".

There's a large number of ways to solve this problem, all dependent on how much work you want to do up front versus manually over time.

Comments

[tombull89]

Your best bet is probably File Server Resource Manager. Set it up to report on disk space and users, and then get it to e-mail you a report weekly/monthly.

[Robert]

Perfect Thank you