Good software to list hard drive folder contents?

[Velvis]

I want to give a client a printout of a shared folder so he can go through it and cross out anything that they no longer need.
Is there a good way of doing this?

 

[glennd]

command line:
dir >list.txt

 

[Larry Sabo]

snap2html

 

[lcoughey]

I second snap2html

 

[Diggs]

snap2html

Oooo - I need to check that out. I've used Karen's Directory Printer but Snap2html is interesting.

 

[Markverhyden]

Oooo - I need to check that out. I've used Karen's Directory Printer but Snap2html is interesting.

It was good to see that someone had started supporting her apps since she passed away many years ago. Too often things like that just fall by the wayside.

 

[Sky-Knight]

I use Windirstat for that, but it's got a bit different purpose, because it'll tell you how large those folders are.

 

[lcoughey]

I use Windirstat for that, but it's got a bit different purpose, because it'll tell you how large those folders are.

Windirstat doesn't export a listing, does it. Snap2html shows the capacity of each folder, too.

 

[Sky-Knight]

Windirstat doesn't export a listing, does it. Snap2html shows the capacity of each folder, too.

I've never used it to export anything, as a free utility I simply install it on every station I administrate. If the operator needs to clean things up, I train them how to use it so they can find the storage hogs. I've never needed anything else.

*Edit* No, I don't see any export functionality at all.

 

[fencepost]

If you're using WinDirStat a lot, you might want to give Wiztree a try. They're happy to accept donations, but it's free software. It pulls data from the MFT instead of scanning directories, so it'll check sizes for locations you don't have permissions for.

 

[River Valley Computer]

If you're using WinDirStat a lot, you might want to give Wiztree a try. They're happy to accept donations, but it's free software. It pulls data from the MFT instead of scanning directories, so it'll check sizes for locations you don't have permissions for.

We have had really good luck with Wiztree also.

 

[mraikes]

snap2html

I haven't needed a tool like this since . . . I don't even remember. But just yesterday the need popped up and I tried snap2html. It's really cool and useful. Exactly what I needed.

 

[lcoughey]

If you're using WinDirStat a lot, you might want to give Wiztree a try. They're happy to accept donations, but it's free software. It pulls data from the MFT instead of scanning directories, so it'll check sizes for locations you don't have permissions for.

Technically, in order to read file and/or folder structure, you are reading the MFT. Wiztree may be more efficiently written, but I suspect that it is just an offshoot of WinDirStat, based on the screen shots.

 

[fencepost]

Similar appearance, very different internals.

Based on how they behave, I'm pretty sure WinDirStat does brute-force recursive enumeration of folders while I'm pretty sure WizTree actually loads in the MFT and parses that directly. I just ran both on my system, WizTree first to give WinDirStat an advantage if there was disk caching. What took WizTree about 20 seconds took WinDirStat 2.5 minutes.

WizTree also has a nice additional feature: you can sort by Allocated space rather than Size. That means that it shows that my 170GB OneDrive folder actually only has 42GB locally on the system, so you can see what's really taking up space. WinDirStat's last major upgrade was in 2006 a year before Dropbox's initial release as EvenFlow, so at that time nobody was even really considering sparse or placeholder files on Windows boxes (ignoring the hard links that you can do on NTFS but which are still a weird edge case).