Handy Tools for Managing File Systems

In Windows Server 2003 Release 2 (R2), you'll find a handy new tool called File Server Resource Manager (FSRM), which is a Microsoft Management-Console (MMC) plug-in. As Mike Otey explains in "New Features in Windows Server 2003 R2" (May 2006, InstantDoc ID 49750), FSRM lets you create hard or soft quotas to limit the space allowed for a volume or folder and notify users when the quota limits are exceeded. You can also create filters that restrict users from saving files with certain extensions.

Using FSRM, I create quota management templates, then apply those templates to folders. To ensure that the templates work properly, I typically test them by coping 100 MB of files from other folders. Not surprisingly, copying 100 MB of files is time-consuming. Fortunately, there's another handy tool called fsutil.exe that lets you create a file of any size on the fly.

You can find fsutil.exe in the C:\Windows\System32 folder in Windows 2003 and Windows XP. The syntax to create a file is

fsutil file createnew
  FileName Length 

fsutil file createnew
  C:\r2testquotas\testfile.txt 
  1ØØØ

With fsutil.exe, you can perform many other file system tasks from the command line. For more information about this tool, go to http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/fsutil.mspx.

—James Lim
james_k_k_lim@apl.com

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