Disk Space

Monitor, Manage and Protect Disk Space

Why is it essential to manage disk space?

Regularly, the Window Book support team works tickets with Clients who have problems caused by a lack of free disk space. This lack of space can be a severe issue on the Windows boot drive, typically drive C. Note that the Windows boot drive does not have to be C, but that is the norm. Disk space is relatively easy to manage, yet it can create problems that escalate when it goes unmanaged (or managed without sufficient frequency). When free disk space is in short supply, it causes Windows to "thrash" because Windows uses disk space to juggle the work it does, especially when the system's RAM requires heavy use. In addition, applications like DAT-MAIL need disk space to create new databases, split Mail.dat files, export files for PostalOne!, print reports and report PDFs, and so on. When no free disk space or very little free disk space, every running process that needs to create a file will either fail or slow down considerably. For example, anyone in Excel who wants to save a spreadsheet will be unable to do so.

While free disk space management might seem unimportant, it can quickly become a bottleneck that starts with one system and affects many others if the free disk space problem occurs on a server.

What causes free disk space to "disappear"?

Applications create files, like that spreadsheet (.XLSX) you save in Excel. Applications like DAT-MAIL create (or expand) databases. SQL Server's normal behavior causes it to log database changes, which means. LDF files grow over time. Legal and regulatory file retention requirements and guidelines force you to keep files for a long time.

How does file retention needs impact disk space requirements?

Files often must be retained for a specific length of time. One example of the retention period for a file is "until our audit / financial reporting period has ended." Another might be "the period that USPS audits require that we retain postage statement data." Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance often impacts these retention periods. Every file kept longer than necessary adds to the disk space needed. When you create ten files a day, that's 3650 files per year. It adds up quickly, particularly for large files.

What does Window Book software do to reduce disk space consumption?

Some of our products monitor free space availability because they can be severely affected when disk space is low. In some cases, our products have features to delete/purge files, databases, and records on database tables that they create as those entities age, but that is not enough. Our software cannot replace a broad-spectrum system management tool but keeps the files and databases we create from making things worse. It is difficult for our products to automatically manage disk space beyond what we create (a work-in-progress) because we don't have a way to create a truly holistic view of your disk space needs and usage.

Do Window Book, Inc. products automatically take steps to reduce disk consumption?

Some products do, such as PostalWeb Connector (PWC). Some products have purge functions that automate deleting files via the use of Scheduler or Windows Task Scheduler. We continue to include more automation for these tasks as we add automation for other functionality important to mailers and shippers.

How much free disk space is enough?

As with RAM and CPU, there is no single easy answer. However, on any Windows machine, there is a point where having less free disk space than the amount of RAM tends to start making things worse in a hurry. When you consider the cost of downtime plus the cost of violating Client service level agreements (SLAs) and compare it to the price of a four terabyte drive (around $100 in early 2018), the benefit and ROI of providing abundant free disk space to your systems and applications are apparent. In some environments, one department in a Company buys disk space from another department, and the cost of that space includes management, backups, and so on. In that situation, you must be careful that your disk requirements are scoped out in detail so that you don't "overindulge" on disk space. It is challenging to use percentages because drives are much larger now. On a desktop, we get uncomfortable when we see less than 20 gigs of free space - and we might get uncomfortable a bit earlier if the desktop use consumption-oriented applications. We are concerned when we see less than 100 gigs of free space on a server, again - depending on usage. If 50 people are using a server, 100 gigs of free space are almost nothing. Remember that Windows needs free disk space to "breathe." If it cannot get the free space it needs to manage memory, it will bog down.

What tools do you recommend that can help us manage our disk space?

Automated tools

We do not have any specific recommendations for automated space management tools. The pricing and capability of these tools vary widely.

Manual tools

WinDirStat is a nice tool for finding "space problems." It allows you to sort folders by space consumption and manage them more quickly as a result. We recommend turning off the fancy "color box" display as we find it adds much to the space management process. Your use of this tool is at your own risk. It is not a Window Book, Inc. product, but we do use it internally. Get it at https://windirstat.net/.