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File Server Analysis! The answer to Tidy File Servers

Before You Move… Clean Up Your Stuff Jeff Laubhan – Waterford Technologies I recently had a conversation with a client who moved offices

Before You Move… Clean Up Your Stuff

Jeff Laubhan – Waterford Technologies

I recently had a conversation with a client who moved offices Which led to file server analysis. In the course of prepping for the new move they realized that there was a great deal of employees that had filing cabinet after filing cabinet of paper, not to mention the guy with so much paper piled up on his desk (Bill) that when you went in his office you couldn’t even see if he was there because of the paper stacked so high. Granted, these employees were like most people who after years and years of being just piled things up. They were busy and never had time to clean up their stuff but felt they needed to keep everything forever. The new office space would be significantly smaller so they wouldn’t be able to take all the filing cabinets plus this was a great opportunity to force employees to go through their paper and decide what they really needed. One box would be given for the move for small personal items and it was recommended to shred, throw away or scan any document they might need.

File Server Analysis

The scanning started and the already creaky file servers started building up fast with documents. Many documents didn’t think or look at the settings on the scanner and one of the IT guys says, “WHAT? Why are all these documents being scanned in on the highest resolution possible?!” So, the IT guy realized something had to be done fast. He had no idea what was going into his file server.

 

He started analyzing the servers and found alarming data trends. He leveraged our File Analyzer reporting solution and found accounting documents from 1989 although their document retention rule was 7 years. How did that happen? Oh, the person in accounting who stored the documents wasn’t with the company any longer and no one bothered to go through their shared drives. Without file server analysis capabilities how would he ever know?

 

So what else will you find when running File Analyzer against your file server? In the past ten years, the file quantity hasn’t changed very much but the average size has gone from 172KB to 8MB. That’s a 46% increase. And 10% of those files were personal files that shouldn’t even be kept on the server to begin with! (YouTube videos, MP3’s, iTunes collections, etc). 23% of files found on the server File Server Analysisare from previous employees who experienced a vocational paradigm shift and are no longer with the company; chances are, you probably don’t need to keep majority of those files. And last but not least, your application backups- the average being 600MB and saved every month for 10 years. You can see that just using these examples alone that the space being eaten up on your file server can be easily identified and quickly solved.

 

At Waterford Technologies, our goal is to make YOU the hero. Whatever your server environment is, we want you to be empowered with the tools that will help and solve whatever issues you run into; not just in the moment but long term.