| Q: | Why is the allocated space that Windows shows in the properties dialog of the drive larger than the allocated space reported by TreeSize Professional? |
| A: | The Windows Explorer and the TreeSize Professional drive list do show the space that is physically allocated on the drive while TreeSize Professional shows the space that is occupied by all files under a certain path. Please make sure that you have the view option "Allocated Space" activated when you are interested in the physically allocated space.
A possibility is that not all parts of the drive could be scanned due to access restrictions. Therefore it is highly recommended to run TreeSize Professional as administrator. Turn on "View > Options > Show Errors Messages" to get notified if a folder cannot be scanned. Turning on the Option "Track NTFS Alternate Data Streams and NTFS Hard Links" in the Options dialog may result in more accurate results but slows down scans. If a drive letter points to a sub-folder of a network drive, the allocated space (correctly) reported by TreeSize Professional may also be much smaller than the physically allocated space on this drive reported by the Windows Explorer because possibly the whole drive is not accessible through the network.
Beyond the space that is needed for storing the files itself, additional space is used for storing management data like the File Allocation Table of the file system or the boot sector. It is not possible to free this space with TreeSize Professional or any other tool. This is usually 0.5 - 2% of the occupied space. Another possibility is that you are using a Software RAID - like Windows offers it - which spreads the data with redundancy over several disks. These disks will appear as one logical volume and the failure of a single disk will not cause any data loss. But for storing the redundant information additional space is needed.
On Thinkpad laptops the Rescue&Recovery feature may use a lot of disk space in the folder "RRBackup" which is not accessible to other applications. |
| Q: | Are there any limitations on the amount of data that TreeSize Professional can query at one time? |
| A: | There are no explicit limitations in what TreeSize Professional is able to scan. The more folders and files the file system tree has that you want to scan, the more free memory will be necessary to store the queried data. You can reduce the memory consumption by turning off the user statistics, the file extensions statistics and/or the file age statistics in the Options dialog. For large server our product SpaceObServer may be suitable as well, which stores the collected data in a database on file level. |
| Q: | Why do all files on my disk have the same last access date which is not far in the past? |
| A: | The date values in the file system are maintained by Windows. Windows updates the last access date of a file each time when an application accesses or reads a file. Many backup and virus tools access every file on your hard disk regularly without restoring the prior last access date. |
| Q: | Why doesn't TreeSize Professional include my disk into its calculation, which is mapped to a directory using the Disk Manager of Windows? |
| A: | By changing the option "Follow mount points and symbolic links" in the Options of TreeSize Professional, you can control if mount points and symbolic links should be followed or if they should be excluded from the calculations. |
| Q: | What is the easiest way to scan all drives of a remote server? |
| A: | TreeSize Professional accepts wildcards in paths, simply tell TreeSize Professional to scan \\Server\?$ in the folder combo on the top left or at the command line. |
| Q: | Scanning a server disk via network is very slow. Is it possible to speed up this process? |
| A: | Scanning a drive via network is normally much slower than scanning a local disk because the speed of the network is much lower than the speed of your hard disk. Additionally, server drives are usually much bigger and contain more files than local hard disks. But you can use the Command Line Options to perform your scans overnight. Network drives and command line options are supported by the Professional Edition only.
For continuous analyzing of disk usage on large servers we recommend our product SpaceObServer. It collects the data using a background system service and stores it in a SQL database. It uses less RAM than TreeSize Professional, and the reporting capabilities are more flexible because it is built on a database. More information is available at http://www.jam-software.com/spaceobserver/ |
| Q: | Is it possible to have the program ignore folders that are less than a certain size when displaying them in the tree? |
| A: | In the context menu of the topmost folder you may choose to remove folders below a certain size. To achieve this, right-click on the topmost icon (or use the "Expand" submenu of the "Branch" menu), select "Expand" and then "Remove Folder <XX MB". |
| Q: | Is it possible to add the free space to the bar chart? |
| A: | The free space is added to the pie chart if TreeSize Professional is in the "Allocated Space" mode and the root of the scanned drive is selected. In other situations (e.g. if a sub-folder is selected or the "Wasted Space" mode is active), it doesn't make sense to add the free space because the relationship between the free space and the other values displayed is wrong. |
| Q: | Can I scan network drives and hidden shares like" \\Server\C$" without connecting them to a drive letter? |
| A: | Yes, in the Professional Edition you can use UNC names like "\\SERVERNAME\Share" to access a network drive by entering them in the drive combo box on the top of the main window. You can also use UNC names on the command line. |
| Q: | I would like to save a set of drives and folders that are scanned each time I start TreeSize Professional. How can I do that? |
| A: | You can specify the startup behaviour of TreeSize Professional in the Options dialog. Or you can simply create a shortcut to treesize.exe on your desktop or Start Menu and add those drives and folders to the command line, separated with a space character. |
| Q: | How can I limit a scan to just one user's files? |
| A: | Please make sure that the option "Create Statistics on File Owners" is activated in the Options of TreeSize Professional. After the scan is finished please right-click on this user on the "Users" tab and choose "Limit to this user" from the context menu. You may also use the Custom File Search to search files of certain users. |
| Q: | On a Novell Netware volume, TreeSize Professional reports compressed files as uncompressed and the user names are missing in the Owner columns. Why? |
| A: | Unfortunately the Netware client for Windows does not supply information about compression and file owners through standard Windows API functions. So developers have to integrate special support for Netware in their applications. We may address this issue in a later version of TreeSize Professional, but so far we do not actively support Netware. All other parts of TreeSize Professional work fine with Netware volumes. |
| Q: | Is it possible to perform a silent installation of this software? |
| A: | Starting the setup with the command line parameters /SILENT /SUPPRESSMSGBOXES /PASSWORD=YourInstallKey will perform a silent and automatic installation with the default settings. Please replace YourInstallKey with the installation key that you received after your registration. Using /VERYSILENT instead of /SILENT will prevent any visual feedback. The option /DIR="x:\dirname" can be used to override the default install path. |
| Q: | Is it possible to search for file extensions with TreeSize Professional? |
| A: | You can for example apply a filter for a scan in the Options by adding patterns like *.bmp to the edit field. A second possibility is to enable the "Create Statistics on File Extensions" feature in the Options. This will provide a detailed statistics for the file types in each sub-tree on the "Extensions" tab and you will be able to limit the values in the directory tree to one file type. A third possibility is to use the Custom File Search of the File Search Module of TreeSize Professional. Our product SpaceObServer has extended and more flexible reporting features if needed. |
| Q: | The wasted space shown by TreeSize Professional is extremely high. How can I reduce the wasted space? |
| A: | Most likely you are using the FAT32 file system which usually produces a lot of wasted space due to its large cluster size. Please read the chapter "Wasted Space" in the help file to understand what wasted space is and to learn how to reduce it. |
| Q: | The folder "System Volume Information" in the root of my drive uses a lot of disk space. What is the purpose of this folder? |
| A: | This folder is part of the Windows System Restore. You shouldn't delete any files in this folder manually. Its size can be reduced by changing the appropriate setting in the System applet of the Windows Control Panel. Windows Vista only allows to turn off the System Restore here. The space used by this service can only be reduced using the Windows command line utility vssadmin. |
| Q: | When I run TreeSize Professional on one of our PCs, a blue-screen occurs / the PC reboots. Why? |
| A: | A normal Windows application like TreeSize Professional cannot cause a blue-screen or a hard reboot, only device drives and central parts of the operating system can cause this. Most likely something with this system is not OK and TreeSize Professional just triggers the real cause for the problem. This can happen because TreeSize Professional accesses parts of the harddisk that are not accessed during normal operation or because of the additional load that a TreeSize Professional scan puts on the machine. |
Q: Can TreeSize Professional be installed on a cluster?
A: Yes, TreeSize Professional can be installed on a cluster. It is not cluster aware, but does not need to be. If you obtain a license for each server and install TreeSize Professional on all machines of the cluster, then you will have TreeSize Professional available at any time on any server of the cluster.
Q: Are there any known problems when using TreeSize Professional on a Citrix server?
A: TreeSize Professional runs in a Citrix environment. But on startup of TreeSize Professional it is may not be visible on the taskbar. If you minimize the application, you can't find it no more. This is a common problem of Citrix server. You can fix it by adding the following keys to your registry:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Citrix\wf shell\TWI]
"DllName"="seamls20.dll"
"NotifyEvent"="WfshellTwiNotify"
"SeamlessFlags"=dword:00000040
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Citrix\wf shell\TWI\TMainForm.UnicodeClass]
"ClassName"="TMainForm.UnicodeClass"
"Type"=dword:00000041
| Q: | Where does TreeSize Professional store the data shown on the "History" tab? |
| A: | This data is stored in the file named ScanHistory.xml which is stored in you user profile directory under Application Data\JAM Software\TreeSize Professional, |
| Q: | If I scan network shares under Windows Vista, I get the error message that the access to certain folders is denied, although I am a domain administrator. What can I do? |
| A: | TreeSize Professional uses a special mechanism of Windows to get file listings of folders to that you actually do not have read access. The same applies if you scan network shares and belong to the group of domain administrators. Windows Vista Service Pack 1 has a bug confirmed by Microsoft that prevents this mechanism from working on network drives. Installing the Hotfix KB950790 for Windows Vista will fix this problem. This Hotfix is included in the Windows Vista Service Pack 2. |
Q: TreeSize Professional shows incorrect number of hard links for files, stored on a network share. What can I do?
A: Since Windows 2008 Server and Windows Vista Microsoft uses "Client Caches" in order to speed up the queries about gathering file and directory meta information on network drives. This approach helps also to utilize the available network bandwidth more efficient. However, these caches do always return an incorrect value for the NTFS hard links (always shown as "1").
The responsible caches can be disabled by the following steps:
1. Run "regedit.exe".
2. Open the path "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\services\Lanmanworkstation\Parameters".
3. Choose "New > DWORD value" in the right click menu and set the name to "FileInfoCacheLifetime" and the value to "0".
After these steps TreeSize Professional should work properly with hard links. For further information about the subject please visit http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff686200(WS.10).aspx
Note: In case a file has been recently opened, the number of hard links will still be shown as 1. After a few seconds the value will be shown correctly again.
