What or who is consuming all that diskspace?

This is a commenly asked question if there is no spaceguard or quotamanager installed on a server hosting shares for groups or users.

Now it's for the system engineer to find out what or who is consuming all the diskspace. A few tools to find that out are Treesize see Figure 1. You can select different criteria and also scan networkdrives.

Figure 1 Treesize (from there website)

Another tool is WinDirStat see Figure 2.

Figure 2 (picture from WinDirStat site)

These 2 tools are just some examples of freeware tools which can scan drives or networkshares and find out who is consuming the most space. A better solution would be offcourse to implement a quota manager like NTP Quota manager (Quota and File sentenial). This tool not only enables you to lock down a directory to for example 200MB but also prefent users from putting files like *.exe, *.mp3 et cetera on the locked down drive. You can easely implement it and the license structure is per server. There are of course other tools like spaceguard and most speak out of expirience when they recommend a tool (like me at the moment). Well let's hope you don't run into this space fight.