How to Manage Network Drive Disk Space

Title: How to Manage Network Drive Disk Space 
Applies to: UofR Employees and staff
Section: File and Deployment
Owner: Manager, File & Deployment Services
Last updated: August 21, 2025

Introduction

This note describes how to manage disk space in the shared network drives. It is recommended to clean up any unused or old files from the network drives. The note covers the following points::
1. How to check the available disk space/usage.
2. Using WinDirStat program to find large files and/or directories
3. T-drive directory owners report.

 

Using WinDirStat program to find large files and/or directories

• WinDirStat is a program that can be used to identify the large files/folders in your system. The zipped executable can be downloaded from WinDirStat Download Page. Then extract (unzip) the downloaded file, browse to "WinDirStat\x64" folder and run the WinDirStat.exe executable.
• A "WinDirStat - Select Drives" window will open, You can select to scan "All Local Drives", "Individual Drives" or "A folder"

Select "A folder" to scan. Browse to and select the folder.

The WinDirStat program starts to scan the sub-directoies and the files of the selected folder. It would take up to few minutes to finish scanning depending on the size of the selected folder.

The scan results show the disk sizes of the sub-directories/files. Click on a sub-directory to check the sizes of the directoies under this sub-directory. You can also select "Treemap" from the menu items, then select "Show Treemap". The treemap represents each file as a colored rectangle, the area of which is proportional to the file's size. The rectangles are arranged in such a way, that directories again make up rectangles, which contain all their files and subdirectories. So their area is proportional to the size of the subtrees. The color of a rectangle indicates the type of the file, as shown in the extension list. The cushion shading additionally brings out the directory structure. After identifying the files to cleanup, you can right click to get the list of actions.

T-drive directory owners report

T-drive directory owners receive a report when their directory space is low. This report is automatically generated once per week and emailed to directory owners who have low disk space. Technote 584 explains the content of this report and how to use to clean T-drive disk space.