Windows 10: Can't see folder size in Explorer

better still, get Linux!

 

Of course Microsoft could have shown folder sizes in Windows Explorer, and done it better than any third party file manager. But they choose not to for reasons explained in posts #5 and #11. It certainly can be lightning fast on a small folder on a local drive. But on a network drive with a slow network connection (and there are plenty of those) it would be anything but fast. It could saturate the network bandwidth for lengthy periods of time, and all for a relatively minor feature. If it had come to that corporate IT managers would have demanded, begged that Microsoft not include this feature.

 

Just so people are aware... as of right now, treesize free file download...according to virustotal.com is registering a single virus in this file.

So before you install go to virustotal and reanalyze it to be sure.

 

I disagree with 'relatively minor feature' it is an extremely valuable feature, and it's an absolute pain-in-the-ass that it doesn't exist within the OS and that I have to buy other software to do it. It is almost fundamental to an operating system that it knows how much space is being used by files at storage locations, and yet this information is kept from the user. Frankly it's retarded.

 

I may be missing something here but doesn't the right-click of a Folder then click on Properties give the total size of a Folder? All of mine do in both the left pane and right pane of File Explorer just like it did in the earlier Windows Explorer. I used the feature just last night in determining how to break up a Folder full of subFolders containing picture files for transfer onto DVD discs.

 

I think what is hoped for is sthg like this:

 

@Berton I've spent more than an hour trying to phrase this response better but in short no. Right click does show some kind of folder size but not what any normal person would understand as "the total size"

I keep writing some kind of dissertation and deleting it.

There are various ways to look at size:

• How big is something assuming the whole file is perfectly aligned on disk boundaries?
• How big would it be if it was/wasn't compressed? Do you want to see compressed or uncompressed size?
• How big would it be if it was/wasn't compressed but some blocks were identical on DASD? Would it be the same?
• How big would it be if your were deduping it and 95% was the same as some other file? Then what?

I have spent a bit of time with the TreeSize guys attempting to get them to report DASD utilization more accurately. It annoyed me that their software would say my compressed Windows directory (I compress it a xpress16k) was shown as 1.9GB when clearly (to me) it was more like 3GB. They said it was too difficult to show compressed disk sizes accurately.

It really isn't an easy question to answer and no, while right click will give you one answer it is not necessarily the correct one or the answer to the question you were asking.

If you want to know how much disk space something requires it needs a more specific question I think.

For example: If I add another mp4 copy of Star Wars or another Windows VM how much more disk space will it take?

I can tell you if I add another Windows VM to my Server (which is running Server TP5) it will increase disk use by around about 500MB. So you tell me - how big is that VM? 500MB as all the software is the same? 20GB as that is the disk size? If I add another copy of star wars it should be zero (almost).

 

For an explanation of why Microsoft does not show folder sizes in Windows Explorer please read my previous posts in this thread. This is a complex situation with far more involved than is immediately apparent.

lx07 has made some good points. There are multiple ways to calculate the disk space consumed by a folder and none are clearly superior to the others. In some situations they can produce very different results. Which one is best depends on why you want the information. The bottom line is that no matter what method used the result is only an approximation. If you understand the issues it is difficult to imagine how it could be otherwise.

 

Hey Berton, you deleted your question while I was replying *Smile

There is nothing wrong with looking at the size of a file or directory on explorer - it will give you a number.

What I'd suggest thogh is test the size. Then compress it and test it again. Then look at the folder it contains and then check with TreeSize and WinDirStat. You'll get different numbers from all of them (and none) are correct or wrong.

When you start thinking about hard-links and so on even deciding what should be there gets impossible.

You can use disk utilization things to find stuff you don't want but to find the actual size (on disk) of something is complicated and depends really on many things - not just the size of the file but how the OS and the underlying file system have decided to deal with it.

For example (sorry if I said this before) I'm running Windows Server TP5 at the moment. If I add a new Windows VM it adds about 500mb to my disk use as server uses de-duplication. This means that blocks on the disk that are the same are not saved twice but rather you have a link pointing to 2 or more different places. As most VMs without data have the same OS stuff there is a lot of duplication.

A new windows VM is still 10GB but it still only adds 500mb of space. If you (as a program) want to report 10GB or 500MB is really up to you and not an easy question to answer.

 

Usually when no specific problem is mentioned the discussion becomes "academic" and thus impossible to solve.

My reason for replying here is that I have an extremely specific problem to solve that I believe many fellow windows users have and I also have a decent methodology to attack it. Here is the issue and the methodology:

I want to find with a top-down approach (therefore extremely quickly), those folders that occupy the largest space on my disk so that I would know where to look to free up the most disk space possible as quickly as possible. Here I can also use the windows search option "size:large" or "size:gigantic" to help me ever more.

What I am missing is the tool to have the folder size next to each folder begining from the root of the folder tree.

If there is another way to achieve the same objective I am full of ears (ehh eyes). It goes without saying that I have used windows disk clean-up tool to free-up disk space.

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3rd party file manager allowing you to see the size:
Xyplorer, Freecommander

Tools to help you manage disk space:
Treesize, Windirstat...
The 10 Best Free Tools to Analyze Hard Drive Space on Your Windows PC
Best Free Disk Space Analyzer | Gizmo's Freeware

 

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Windirstat is precisely the tool I was looking for !!

Thank you so much !

 

Great tool... & lx07 mentioned it - #22

 

I was disappointed when upgraded to 8.1 then 10. What made me wonder is why don't they put in some kind of a toggle option to show/not show the file sizes so the slow one wouldn't have to load the file size stats, then toggle to show the file size stats. But hey-ho, easy to remove than fix!

 

File or folder sizes? Or do you mean showing the file sizes is slow on your system? It shouldn't be..