ASP.NET Visual Basic application - Disk weight directory report

Index all the files on your hard drive(s) and store them in a SQL server 2005 database

This application lists all your local drives and allows you to scan all your files. As the files are scanned their paths, names and sizes are stored in a database for future retrieval and statistical analysis. The analysis portion of the program will let you see how much space a certain folder takes up on your drive. In addition to being able to search your entire file system, you can also view a graph, that is dynamically generated from the data that was previously acquired from your file system. Sounds like fun! Lets get started...

The first undertaking is to procure the necessary software. Since this program will run in a browser, we will be using visual web developer express. The database software is SQL server express with Management studio express that will help us visually design and debug the data that we will be storing. Both these programs are free. If you own Visual studio you can use that in place of the express versions as it is more feature rich. The free versions provided by Microsoft are ample to create and debug this application.

Create a database called FileSystemDB. Now create a table called fileSystemTable. This table will hold references to all the files on all our drives within the file system. Note that you can also create separate tables for each drive in question depending on the size of your drives. The advantage to having just one table is that it is easy to manage as all the data is located centrally. The disadvantage is speed, especially if you have millions of files.

Here is the SQL code you can use to create the fields.