News & Blog

What Is On My File Server?

Running out of Space! Jeff Laubhan – Waterford Technologies Every IT administrator runs up against the challenge of managing an incredible growth

Running out of Space!

Jeff Laubhan – Waterford Technologies

Every IT administrator runs up against the challenge of managing an incredible growth in file servers and as pictures and videos are increasing becoming higher resolution the files just keep growing.

I just had the 9th conversation in 2 days with an account that is struggling with growth but doesn’t have the tools to better see what they have. Sure, you can write scripts to try to decipher the mound of data and this works to a point but where to begin ? Is it the oldest files, largest files, files by owner ? We as a business realized years ago that our software aside, companies just want to see what they have.File Server

Waterford Technologies developed the SSE (storage estimator tool) to bring value to the marketplace and at least start a conversation about what is on the servers. A couple of examples come to mind:

  1.  EXE’s – yes, a client found 75 GB of exe files that the IT guy said “what the heck” and when he looked into it, they were old program files where a previous administrator was storing copies of all program executables for a rainy day. With software updates these days there is no purpose to store on the network, you can just download the latest version.
  2.  BAK – Do you have backup files from 1996 ? One of my clients stumbled across daily full backup files they still kept around. The irony is that the software program was discontinued years ago.
  3. PST – Yes, the worlds of email and file collide. 400 GB of user PST files sitting on the file server being backed up every night. Yes, this is important, but considering they are old, shouldn’t they be kept on lower tier storage. When reviewing the PST files many were from former employees. In asking around the IT leadership decided to just burn them to DVD and make available to the department managers if they really needed to retrieve data.
  4. Videos – .MOV and other files were taking up hundreds of GB. Yes, they could be legitimate, but upon further examination the HR group was kind enough to keep all the company softball video clips for the last 9 years on the network. Really ?

So, what’s on your network ? You might check out our SSE tool here to give you a sense of what you have.