ATTENTION: Windows Vista breaks this feature! Find Unused Files does not work on Windows Vista.
IF YOU ARE USING WINDOWS VISTA, PLEASE READ: This software does not work on Windows Vista.
Even if it did, the reports would be useless to you because Windows Vista disables the update of last access date of files on NTFS volumes. Microsoft did this to improve Vista performance on NTFS systems. You can switch it on by a registry tweak but you will have to wait for many months for the reports to be any useful. Hence, we have even removed this Unused Files Report from the latest version of our utility ShowSize when it runs on Vista.
Find Unused Files
List unused files on your hard disk
PLEASE READ FIRST: If Find Unused Files is not able to find any unused files on your disk, the most probable reason is that you run a Virus Scan operation or some other disk utility (such as defrag) that updates the last access date of all the files to current date. As a result, an important piece of information, that shows when a file was actually used last, is lost. This is not a problem of Find Unused Files but of Virus Scan software as it failed to restore the last access date to what it was before the scan operation. Windows has features to restore the access date. Perhaps, some day, the virus scan software would be smarter to restore the original access date after a scan. Till then, you have to live with this problem.
Have you ever wondered how many files are unused on your disk for the last 300 days? Find Unused Files can show you a report of such files. You can tell Find Unused Files to look for files which have not been used for a certain number of days. You can specify which folder to look in and whether to include the subfolders when looking for such files. Try Find Unused Files, and you might be surprised by the results. See a sample report in the picture on the right. Various sorting options are also available to view the report in a desired order.
Once you have a Find Unused Files report, you can use this information in any way you want. Here are some examples of how Find Unused Files helps me:
I have a folder C:\downld where I usually download files from the Internet. With Find Unused Files, I was reminded of some very old files that I had downloaded but never looked at. Similarly, I found files that I had downloaded and installed, but which I forgot to delete. Thanks to Find Unused Files, I could delete these files to get more disk space. You can see another example of unused Eudora files in the sample report picture above.
I am a developer and use Borland Delphi for some of my development projects. When I ran Find Unused Files, I discovered a very large DOC file in my Delphi folder which I had never noticed. It contains all the details of using QuickReport components. So far, I was frustrated not to find any information in the main help file. Thanks to Find Unused Files, I located this important file.
In a Find Unused Files report, I located several very large files which were not used in the last 400 days. But, the files were a part of the archive that I wanted to save. So, I simply made two back up copies of the files and then deleted them.
As you can see above, depending on the situation, you can use your own strategy for dealing with such unused files. Knowledge is power, and Find Unused Files gives you enough knowledge of these unused files so that you can make your own decision on what to do with them. Use Find Unused Files and monitor the usage of your files. You might turn up a treasure, or you may get skeletons that need to be removed. Have fun!
We have a new utility ShowSize that you can use to view the full sizes of folders on any drive. For more details, please see please see ShowSize web site.
Find Unused Files 1.5
We have a new utility ShowSize that you can use to view the full sizes of folders on any drive. For more details, please see please see