Can't see folder size in Explorer

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 :)

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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lx07 said:

Hey Berton, you deleted your question while I was replying :)

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.

dalchina said:

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 !

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!

So the consensus seems to be that although all previous versions of Windows was able to calculate the total size of files in a folder, Windows 10 can't? This is silly. What computers do more easily than anything else is add up numbers. Yeah, if you have a million files it might take a while. And you'd probably not be surprised if it took a long time. But most of the time, a tree of folder does NOT contain a million files. For me this is just one more of the many failings and annoyances of Windows 10. It seems to be more entertainment than work.