ShowSize version 4 now includes complete functionality of Find Unused Files in one of the report panes. ShowSize 4 uses new listing technology so that it is able to list a very large number of files or folders in any of its reports. With the release of ShowSize 4, ShowSize users no longer need the utility Find Unused Files. A single scan in ShowSize produces all the reports. For more details, please see ShowSize 4 page.

Find Unused Files uses the 'Last access date' of a file to determine when it was used last. It depends on Windows and the file system to maintain the correct 'Last access date' for files. This information may not be correct for certain types of files and file systems. You must understand that some situations might affect the access date of the files.

Find Unused Files does not work on Windows Vista.

This software does not work on Windows Vista yet.

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. For more details, please see the last item on the Blog article: ShowSize on Vista.

Be careful when you delete those files!

Although, Find Unused Files tries to confirm if a file system supports the Last Access Date feature properly, you must use your own judgement in using this information, especially when making a decision to delete some files or to perform other critical operations based on the report.

Are you getting zero results? See how a Virus Scan may affect your reports

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 a disk utility such as defrag) regularly on all the files, perhaps, every day. What happens is that a Virus Scan or defrag may mark each file as "used" on the date that you run the scan. More technically speaking, it updates the Last Access Date to the date when you run a Virus Scan. 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.

To summarize, if you have run Virus Scan on all the files even once, you may have actually lost the original access dates that show when the files were actually "used." Now, Find Unused Files reports will effectively show you unused files since the last date you ran the Virus Scan. Of course, this situation may change if a smarter Virus Scan software evolves that doesn't disturb the access dates.

Why didn't that file appear in the next report?

For certain types of files, the access date may be updated to today's date when you perform an Explorer operation such as 'Properties' on it. Such a file may not appear again in the report when you run Find Unused Files next time. If you have a real time Virus check software installed, it is possible that as soon as you see Explorer properties of a file, its last access date is updated to today's date because virus scan software scans it. Hence, it is best to save the reports so that you know what was a file's actual last use date.

Save that report!

Considering all the above cases, if a report looks important to you, it is better to print it or save it to a text file for future reference. The Save operation is available on the File menu of the report.

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