SharePoint site space usage (limited admin access)

Question

I would like to find out how much space my group's SharePoint site uses or at least how much its document libraries use (files + version history). However, I am only a site administrator (not site collection or farm administrator). I'm interested in the total, but usage per individual file is also fine.

I've googled everything I could think of but couldn't find much that would help. SharePoint programming seems out of the question since I don't have access to the machine. SharePoint Web Services looked promising but none of the services provided seem to give me what I need. I also found a VBA library that lets me list the versions of a document: Office.DocumentLibraryVersion. However, this type does not include a "size" property - why not?

I previously asked this same question on Stack Overflow without any satisfactory responses (I am almost cross-posting, in fact). I have recently installed SharePoint Designer and messed around with it, and while the reports it provides are pretty cool, site usage still includes the sum of only the current versions of files.

Anyway, I would be happy with either of the following solutions:

• A library or API to be used from VBA, VB, or C# (or any other language, for that matter)
• A SharePoint Web Service that provides file size/space usage information
• Some SharePoint Designer reporting option that I missed or a way to create custom reports
• A crazy script that uses http to iterate through all the folders/files/versions in the library, figures out the size of each file, then adds them together and returns the grand total (SharePoint du)

Basically, anything you can think of would help. At this point, even "this is not possible" would be useful. I am currently estimating size based on the largest files, which is inelegant, very imprecise, and rather time consuming.

Thanks in advance.

P.S. Please note that I do not have full administrative access to the SharePoint installation, so I cannot access Site Collection settings and reports. I am only a site administrator.

P.P.S. Just to clarify, if you told me how to find the amount of space taken up by one document library or even a single file with all its versions, that would be more than satisfactory. Furthermore, if you are an experienced SharePoint administrator and are unaware of an easy solution for this, please post so I can stop looking.

Answer 1

This might not be what you want, but have you at all considered just setting site quotas to secure sites staying under a predefined size?

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287673.aspx

Answer 2

Frankly I wonder if you're going above and beyond the call of duty trying to find how much space your site is using :) This is something Operations should be able to tell you! It is definitely true that SharePoint doesn't make this easy (to my knowledge), but tools such as Quest are typically used for this kind of reporting.

Answer 3

Is the information reported using SharePoint Designer (2007) sufficient? I have been using the properties reported by right clicking on the site, in the folder list, in SharePoint Designer. This gives a report of how many files are in the system and how much space is used.

Answer 4

As an Site Owner (and not a Site Collection Admin) you should be able to connect to your site using SharePoint Designer. Once connected, you can click on Site->Reports->Site Summary. This report shows All Files and the total size in KB of all files on your site.

Answer 5

Recently I had similar requirement,This answer is same as Anders's. But the links in the article also have an option to get the details from code SharePoint Object Model.You can give it a try to see if those API works without quota

Answer 6

Goto the Site Collection Quotas and Locks page (Central Administration > Application Management > Site Collection Quotas and Locks). Select a site collection and at the bottom they show how much space the site collection is using.

Answer 7

You can go to the Site Collection Usage page. Site Settings > Usage Summary (Under Site Collection Administration). This should tell you how much storage used by the entire site collection and how much your site's quota allows.

Answer 8

If you can get read access to the SQL database for your SharePoint site, the following link has some SQL querries that can get you the information you are looking for:

http://www.codeproject.com/kb/dotnet/QueriesToAnalyzeSPUsage.aspx

-Ron

Answer 9

http://www.thesug.org/Blogs/lsuslinky/ssm

It's a free tool to analize the disk space usage on a SharePoint Site Collection. Has to be run on the server, though, as it uses the SP API.