MONITOR DISK USAGE BY USER

In any given organization, you'll find a wide variety of users. Some users carefully maintain their network-based files and folders, and they avoid using too much space. Others see network storage as a great backup mechanism for their 10,000 music files.

Regardless of what your users are storing, you should make it a habit to regularly examine disk space usage. Making this a part of your normal routine can help you decide whether additional space is worth the expense and whether your users are wasting space.

The Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit includes the User Disk Usage tool (Diskuse.exe), a command-line utility that monitors disk space usage on a per-user basis.

This utility offers a number of parameters. For a complete list of these parameters, enter diskuse /? at the command line.

Here are some of the most useful parameters of this utility:

* /s: This returns results for the current directory and all subdirectories.

* /t: This returns the output in a tabular format.

* /f:<filename>: This writes the results to the specified file, which you can import into Excel for analysis.

Enter at the command line:

C:\>diskuse c: /s /t

to start this utility.