In this tutorial, we are going to show you how to limit the disk space usage of your users in Windows 7.

Limiting the user’s profile size

In Windows 7, the user profile is usually stored in “c:\users\username” (replace username with the name of the user). This profile includes all the data related to an user. You will be able to find “Desktop”, “Documents”, “Music”, “Videos”, “File settings”, etc within this profile folder.

Note: This tutorial can only be used in Ultimate, Professional and Enterprise editions. Other versions of Windows 7, such as the Home Premium or Basic, doesn’t include the group policy editor.

We are going to use an inbuilt utility so there is no need to download or use third party applications. Our first step is to open the group policy editor.

Click the Start button and type “gpedit.msc” (without quotes) in the search field.

Once the Local Group Policy Editor window appears, go to “Local Computer Policy -> User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> System -> User Profiles”.

On the right pane, you should be able to see a list with multiples entries. Scroll down the list to find an entry “Limit profile size”. It should show “Not Configured” under the State column.

Double click the “Limit profile size” entry. This will open up a configuration window. At the top, select the “Enabled” button.

At the bottom, you can set the maximum profile size for each user profile and the custom message to show when the size is exceeded.

Optionally, you can select the option “Notify user when profile storage space is exceeded” so that your system will notify the users when the limit is reached.

For Windows earlier than Vista, when the profile size is exceeded, the system won’t let the user log off until the profile size size is reduced to within the limit. For Windows Vista and above, the user can still log off, but they won’t be able to sync their profile with the roaming profile server.

Note: Windows, in this case only control profile size. It will not control direct sub folders of the C drive or other drivers different that the one containing the system.

Do you have ever use an application to limit the file usage by an user?

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BleachBit is a software for Linux that scans your computer and deletes unnecessary files to free valuable disk space, maintain privacy, and remove junk. It supports a wide variety of applications and is able to rid your system of old clutter like cache, cookies, Internet history, localizations, logs, temporary files, and broken shortcuts.

Download the Bleachbit installer for your distro. If you are using Ubuntu Jaunty, you can install it directly from the repository.

Once you have installed Bleachbit, go to Applications->System Tools. You will see two options: Bleachbit and Bleachbit as Administrator. As its name implies, opening Bleachbit as Administrator allows you to clean up and delete files from the system folder.

The left pane of the Bleachbit window shows the list of applications that it supports. Put a check on those applications that you want to clean up (Cleaning up doesn’t mean uninstallation, it only deletes the cache files created by the applications). Click on the Preview button to see the files that will be deleted. You can also scroll down to the end of the list to see the amount of disk space it going to free up once all the cache/temporary files are deleted.

Once you are done with the preview, click on the Delete button to wipe out all the cache files.

That’s it.

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In a previous post I talked about a great disk usage analysis tool called TreeSize Free that visually summarized how your disk was being used.  Free Disk Analyzer performs a similar task, however it also has some added features and some better graphics.

In this walkthrough I’ll show you what Free Disk Analyzer is all about and we’ll look at some comparison shots with TreeSize Free.

Installation

Start by downloading the installation package for Free Disk Analyzer from the ExtenSoft web site.  Like most of the applications that we review, the installer for Free Disk Analyzer is very easy to use.  Just walk through the steps using the installation wizard and you will be up and running in less than a minute.

You can install Free Disk Analyzer in a number of languages including English, French, Dutch, German, and Russian.

Usage

After completing the installation and launching the Free Disk Analyzer, you will be presented with a similar window as I’ve shown below.  This shot gives a nice and quick breakdown of disk usage by volume.

To kick start or update the analysis, click on Analyze in the menu bar.  Once selected, “Analysis in progress…” will display in the status bar at the bottom.

By double-clicking on a volume, or by using the tree in the left-most pane, you can drill down into specific areas of storage.  In the following example, you can see a comparison of my D: drive using Free Disk Analyzer and TreeSize Free.  The numbers are slightly off, but I would say they are close enough to each other to be accurate.  As expected, both applications give similar results, however Free Disk Analyzer (on the left) really shines from a GUI standpoint.

The next comparison shows a drill-down into the storage folder, which is the biggest consumer of storage space on that drive.  Once again, Free Disk Analyzer really shines from a graphical display standpoint.  However both applications are accurate and will get the job done.

Clicking on the Largest Files tab, at the bottom of the window, will bring back a listing of the files that are consuming the most space for the folder and sub-folders you selected.  Looking at Program Files, you can see that my Assassin’s Creed and Unreal Tournament 3 folders are the biggest consumers of hard drive space. Yikes!

Checking out the Largest Folders tab will get you a breakdown of sub-folder sizes.  As expected from the previous shot, my two game directories are the biggest culprits for space waste.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, the functionality of Free Disk Analyzer is basically what you would expect from any application claiming to analyze space consumption.  What this program excels at is really in the presentation.

If style is your thing, then I strongly encourage you to get a copy of this app today! You won’t be disappointed.

Do you have another favorite disk usage analysis tool?  Let us know in the comments, we’d love to hear about it!

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Double Killer is software that allows you to identify duplicate files (files of same content) and delete them with extreme care. Why do I highlight the term with extreme care? The reason for this is Double Killer checks CRC-32 values of every file and make sure that the file is an exact duplicate before it proceeds to remove it. For your info,  the CRC-32 value of a file is like the finger print for the file and is regularly used as an  important criteria to identify files of the same content.

To illustrate, let’s say I have a folder named ‘E-books‘ in different partitions drive and  I am going to use Double killer to identify duplicate files.

1. Download the Double killer from this site.

2. Unzip the zipped file and double click the DoubleKiller.exe file to execute it.

3. Go to ‘Options‘ tab and set the search criteria. It is important to exclude the system files and any files with extension.

4. Add the directories where you want to search for duplicate files. In our case, I have to select two folder named “E-books” from different drives such as D:\ and E:\

5. Once the required directories are added, click on ‘Run‘ button to start the search for duplicated files

6. Double Killer will then return results for files that have the same CRC check sums and list them based on criteria like size, date modified and CRC value.

7. You can now delete the duplicated files using the Delete options provided in Double Killer. To delete all duplicate entry, click on the ‘Check the last dupes‘ button.

8. Once Delete files in clicked all duplicates files will be deleted and ensure the CRC-32 value for files to safely delete.

Note: On some rare cases, you may see ’0000000′ in the CRC value (as seen in the screenshot above). In such incident, the application is not able to figure out the CRC value of the files for some reason. You may want to check manually if those files are duplicates and remove them from your hard disk.

That’s it. You should now have a cleaner hard disk with little or no duplicate files in your system.

What other software do you use to clean up your system?

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I found a great little application that does the great big job of creating visuals of your hard drive consumption.  It’s called TreeSize Free, and it was developed by JAM Software.  In this short tutorial, I’ll walk you through some of the basic functions.

Naturally, the first step is to download the software and install it on your PC.  There is nothing out of the ordinary with this install.  In fact, you can leave all of the parameters at their default settings.  Once you have completed the installation and launched TreeSize Free, you should see a window similar to the one below.

You might want to give it a few minutes to completely analyze your hard disk.  On a 40 GB hard disk, the application completed a scan in about 75 seconds.

Taking a closer look, you can see the simplicity designed into this handy little tool.  There are plenty of options for changing how you see the data.  In the image above, the drive space consumption is shown in MB.  Clicking on the % icon in the tool bar will allow you to see the same information, however this time it will be represented as a percentage of the whole.  I personally found this format to be more informative.

Visualizing the state of a different drive is a very easy task.  Simply select Scan from the menu, then select the drive you want to analyze.  Once again, depending on the size of your drive, it may take a few minutes to complete the scan.

As you can see in the above screen capture, 73% of the drive space used on my d: drive is located in a folder called Storage.  My virtual machines also take up an additional 14% of that utilized drive space, while Program Files consumes another 12%.  I have a couple of options here.  I could use the Programs and Features tool in my Windows Vista Control Panel to remove any unnecessary programs, that would reduce the size of the Program Files folder.

It’s painfully obvious that the biggest offender of consumed space is a folder called Storage.  Clicking on the [+] sign, next to the Storage folder, gives a further breakdown of the space consumption.

Low and behold, the Downloads folder is the culprit!  This is a folder where I temporarily store downloads before they get moved to my network storage or a portable USB drive.  It looks as though I haven’t cleaned up that folder in a while.

TreeSize Free is clearly a very useful and powerful tool to assist you with hard disk space management.  It will help you get right down to the roots of understanding where your storage has gone.  I would highly recommend this freeware tool to anyone with hard drives to manage.

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