Use Sumation Explorer to safely identify, analyze, and act on your storage capacity issues. Make better use of your backup or CD/DVD writer with the prepared archived assets and free up your critical storage capacity

Using a simple 4 step process, you can effectively begin the process of storage resource management. The 4 steps logically address the determination, identification, and action to achieve your initial SRM goals.

Step 1 - Drive Level
The Storage Tab will provide users with an overview of all hard drives and network (remote) connections. You can easily see the capacity usage to identify drives that you would like to analyse in the subsequent steps.

Step 2 - Folder Level
Use the Folder Size Tab to return the folder sizes from a particular starting point. You could run this on the entire drive, but this would be very resource intensive on large drives. Select smaller areas to work on, for example, the "C:\Documents and Settings" folder.

• Perform the Search
• Identify large folders for further analysis
• Optionally export results for better analysis in a spreadsheet.

Now you will have a pretty good idea of which folders should be investigated further to identify the files that should be moved, archived or deleted.

Step 3 - File Level
Identify the files that should be archived, moved, deleted or reorganized in a new directory structure. Identify candidate files by:

• File Name
• File Extension, e.g. *.doc
• File Attribute, i.e. hidden, system, etc
• Optionally include subfolders of the root search folder or drive
• Specify Date Criteria on File
  • Last Creation Date
  • Last Modified Date
  • Last Accessed Date

*Note on Dates: Anti-virus software will effectively invalidate last accessed dates in search criteria as this date will reflect the date and time that the AV accessed the file.

Step 4 - Take Action
Use the Sumation Operation button on the File/Search Tab to perform the desired operation on your files. Once the job is submitted, you can review the job on the Sumation Tab. This allows you to validate your options, particularly the restructuring of folders before initiating the job.

Sumation Explorer will also respect your file dates and preserve the original dates at the new location to ensure that this level of file integrity is not lost.