Blast from the past 2008: It’s an Admin’s worst nightmare (well one of them).
The information published below on AtA 3 years ago today still rings true. Check it out:
It’s an Admin’s worst nightmare (well one of them).
A server’s system disk is quickly running out of space for no apparent reason. You know that when the system drive fills the server is going to shut down and you’re going to have a lot of unhappy users. You need to find out what is taking up so much space.
There are several tools for looking around your drive and getting a visual image of what is on it. Tools like WinDirStat, Folder Size and TreeSize all do a nice job of showing you where all that space is going.
But sometimes you need a quick and dirty tool and (if you’re like me) you don’t want to install something on your servers unless you really need to.
That’s one great thing about SequoiaView, it gives you a nice visual map of any drive or folder without installing anything. Download the zipped version, unzip it and run the executable. There’s nothing to install or risk messing up your servers with. Delete the whole folder when you are done and there’s no trace of it.
Of course, I am using JFFNMS to monitor my network so I was able to learn about this impending disaster early enough to do something about it. In my case – I had forgotten to reconfigure the IIS logging on my Exchange server, so the OWA logs were slowly filling up the system drive since they default to Windows\System32\LogFiles.
What do you use to monitor disk space on your servers? Do you have any horror stories to share with AtA? Well that is what the comments are for!
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about 6 months ago
I recommend Directory Report
http://www.file-utilities.com
It is faster than WinDirStat
No Eye Candy
about 6 months ago
Thanks BinaryMan! I will check it out.
about 4 months ago
Thanks, Quite Helpful
about 4 months ago
WinDirStat is awesome, I actually use it quite frequently.
The installer is somewhat annoying, all it really does it create shortcuts to the program. You can copy the windirstat.exe file to another system and run it directly, the installer isn’t really needed.
WinDirStat is actually based in part on SequoiaView’s treemaps.
For real time disk space monitoring I use Xymon, although I’m not sure I would recommend it!
about 3 months ago
Treesize comes in portable flavour as well now so its handy to just having kicking around in your tools directory. I do like windirstat as well, its handy seeing instantly which are the biggest files.