Knowledgebase

Yes. If Samba is installed running on the Linux/UNIX system, then our tools can access a share on this system using its UNC name, e.g. '\\ComputerName\ShareName'.
If the file system on the Linux/UNIX system is accessible through NFS, then it can be accessed if the NFS support for Windows is installed. Please go to the Control Panel and activate the 'Services for NFS' under 'Programs and Features > Turn Windows Features on or off'. Then you can mount an NFS share to a drive letter using this command:
mount \\ComputerName\ShareName N:

It might be necessary that you create the following registry values if you have trouble connecting the NFS drive:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ClientForNFS\CurrentVersion\Default\AnonymousUid as DWORD with the decimal value 10011.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ClientForNFS\CurrentVersion\Default\AnonymousGid as DWORD with the decimal value 10012.
SpaceObServer can also scan Linux and Unix shares using SSH.

SpaceObServer is compatible with all current versions of the following databases: MS SQL Server, MSSQL Azure and PostgreSQL. Please find more details here. You can also use the free Express editions of the commercial SQL servers.

Since Windows 2008 Server and Windows Vista, Microsoft uses 'Client Caches' in order to speed up the queries about gathering file and directory meta information on network drives. This approach also helps to utilize the available network bandwidth more efficiently. Anyway, these caches always return an incorrect value for the NTFS hardlinks (always shown as '1').

Caches can be disabled by the following steps:
1. Run 'regedit'
2. Open the path 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\services\Lanmanworkstation\Parameters'.
3. Choose "New > DWORD value" in the right click menu and set the name to 'FileInfoCacheLifetime' and the value to '0'.
4. Save the registry and quit 'regedit'.

After these steps SpaceObServer should work properly with hardlinks. For further information about the subject please visit the Microsoft Website.
Note: In case a file has been recently opened, the number of hardlinks will be shown as 1. After a few seconds the value will be shown correctly again.

Since DFS shares do not represent a physical directory structure, the option 'Follow mount points and symbolic links' must be activated in the "Configure Scans" dialog. By default, folders that are not physically located at the location to be scanned are excluded from the scan.

The first scan of SpaceObServer always takes longer than the subsequent scans , since the whole database structure has to be built and the complete file system information is collected during the initial scan. Update scans only collect the file system changes since the last scan. The speed of update scans basically depends on the number of file system changes, the number of changed files and the database size (amount of data that has already been collected into the database).

Yes, multiple scans can be added via the OLE Automation of SpaceObServer. Further information can be found here.

To make sure that the SpaceObServer Client Access does not connect to the remote file server, go to "Tools > Options > View > General" and activate "Determine Icons based on file extension only", deactivate "Show files deleted since last scan grayed" and deactivate "Show long tool tips in the directory tree".

The SpaceObServer Add-on SpaceObServer Web Access can access scan results via your internet browser and provides only reporting functionality. You can also do this by using the SpaceObServer Client Access, which is a separate product. Just create a user profile on your SQL server without write access to the SpaceObServer database. Ensure that the connection of the SpaceObServer Client Access uses this user profile. The Client Access will be able to create reports for any scanned shares of the database, but will not be able to schedule scans. All database manipulating features of the user interface will be deactivated. Many of our customers are already providing the data collected by SpaceObServer to their users this way.

Besides of a simple deletion of redundant duplicate files SpaceObServer offers the possibility to deduplicate chosen files. This will recover the disk space allocated by your duplicate files but leave links to the files content in your file system.
Note: Before deleting or deduplicating any duplicate files you should ensure that the listed files are really redundant and not used, e.g. as part of a backup.

By default the "Duplicate Files" list shows all files with same name, size and last change date. You can optionally use MD5 checksums to detect files with equal content. In this case you have to activate the option "Calculate MD5 checksums for files" (See "Configure Scans"), which results in slightly higher allocated database space and some increased performance usage of the "SpaceObServer Service". You can customize the combination of these criteria used for identifying duplicates in the options. Use the function "Compare Files Byte by Byte" from the context menu of this list to check the content of the selected files byte by byte.