How to start a scan

SpaceSniffer gives you many ways to start a scan. When you start the application, a start dialog will appear asking you what to scan. You can:

• Double click a media icon, or select a media icon with the keyboard and then press ENTER key
• Type a path in the path field. If the path is too difficult to type manually, you can press the PATH button and then browse for the path to scan
• Drag and drop a folder from Windows Explorer into the start dialog. Only one folder is permitted here. After dropping the folder, you will find his path i the path field
• Close the start dialog and directly drag and drop in the main window as many folders as you like. Remember that each dropped folder is a new view window

How to print a report

SpaceSniffer lets you produce a textual report of your searches:

• First of all, filter the files you need to report and navigate to the folder that will be the "root" of the report.
• Then, select File/Export command from the SpaceSniffer main menu. The export module interface will appear on screen.
• Choose one of the available export configurations. SpaceSniffer comes with some built-in ready to use configurations, but if you wish you can customize, add and remove them. Please have a look at the "Export Customization" documentation included in the SpaceSniffer package from v1.1.0.0.
• Press the export button on the upper toolbar and save the resulting textual report as a file.
• Then, you can print the report with any application you wish.

How to automate operations on files

SpaceSniffer export module, if correctly configured, lets you produce also batch files. So, you can automate operations on huge number of files. For security reasons no batch file configurations are built-in provided but nobody stops you to experiment and share your scripts!

If you produced nice scripts, please share! We'll pleased to expose them when they'll be available!

How to temporary hide those big files

Sometimes, a really big file comes in the way and prevents you seeing more smaller files. This can be annoying but with file tagging you can solve the problem:

• Just set a tag excluding filter such as |:red (this hides red tagged files).
• Then, simply hover the mouse on the annoying file and press CTRL+1 or simply 1 if the filter field is not focused.
• The file is tagged and will disappear, letting more space for smaller files to display.
• When you had enough, simply remove the file filter to see everything again. If you wish to display only tagged files, then transform the excluding filter in an including filter by removing the starting pipe character.

How to navigate faster in the structure

SpaceSniffer is intuitive in structure navigation. When you zoom in/out every place is bookmarked so you can go back and forth by pressing the web-like toolbar buttons.
But if you are in a hurry and have no time to lose, you can speed up the navigation experience by using the BACKSPACE (go back) keyboard key. By combining mouse double click to zoom in and BACKSPACE key to go back, the navigation speed is greatly improved! You can also adjust the zoom speed to take less time. It's up to you.

How to integrate SpaceSniffer in the windows folder popup menu

Do you want to integrate SpaceSniffer in the Windows Explorer context menu, so you can analyze a folder directly by its popup menu? That's simple. First of all, you must copy the SpaceSniffer executable in a fixed folder of your hard drive (don't keep it into a flash drive or you could miss the executable if you remove the drive). For example, i put the executable in my c:\pub folder.

Copy the following code and paste it into an empty notepad document. You must edit the code (the last line) accordingly to the path where your exe is situated. Then save it with filename "spacesniffer.reg".


Then, simply double click the saved file and the registry of your machine will be updated. Now, in the Windows popup menu the new command will be visible (this applies only to folders)

How to start SpaceSniffer through command line

You can start SpaceSniffer also through the command prompt. SpaceSniffer can understand some parameters commands. To view all the possibilities you can type in a command prompt:

SpaceSniffer.exe help

Or you can choose the Command line help in the About menu of the main window.

Examples: Let's explain how to drive SpaceSniffer through parameters:

SpaceSniffer.exe scan c:\

will start a single scan on drive c:\

SpaceSniffer.exe scan c:\;d:\

will start two scan views on respective paths.

SpaceSniffer.exe scan "c:\Program Files;c:\Windows"

you can type also a complete path, just consider that if the path contains spaces, all the compound paths parameter must be surrounded with "" chars.

SpaceSniffer.exe scan c:\ filter *.jpg;*.gif

the filter command will apply to the previous scan command. So this will scan the c:\ drive for JPEGs and GIFs.

SpaceSniffer.exe scan c:\ filter *.jpg scan d:\;e:\ filter *.gif;>100kb

got the idea?

How to remove those annoying animations!

If the mouse trailing animation is annoying for you, then you can deactivate it from the Configure/Colors panel

How to speed up the scanning process

SpaceSniffer shows you the scanning process in a pleasant way. But when you are accustomed to this maybe you are better interested in scan speed. To improve the scanning speed you can:

• Decrease the graphics refresh rate in the Configure/Effects panel. This leads to a "choppy" animation but goes faster
• Deactivate the scanning of NTFS Alternate Data Streams in the Configure/Behaviour panel if you don't need it
• Minimize the SpaceSniffer window or hide it under other windows during the scan process. This will improve greatly the scanning speed since the graphics is no more updated.
  Then, restore the window when the scan has finished

Anyway, be aware that you can start navigating the structure even before the scan process ends. It's not necessary to wait it to terminate.