I would like to do some general maintenance, and remove unwanted large files.
I imagine one way would be to search with a file size filter, to look for arbitrary sizes and skim for large sized files. But the existing search doesn't appear to include a way to filter by size.
Is there another way to do this? Thanks!
Hi Hugh,
Welcome to the Box Community!
If you are looking to filter your files by size, this should be possible with Box Search function.
For details, please take a look at this article: https://support.box.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043696314-Search-for-Files-Folders-and-Content
You may also sort items in your Box by file size by clicking on the header of the 'Size' column.
Thanks for reaching out and if you have any questions, please let us know!
Best,
Hi, France. File size is not an option for the standard search filters.
The documentation suggests it can be done using a Metadata Template, but I am not given any templates to choose from, so that's a dead end. Box documentation (https://support.box.com/hc/en-us/articles/360044196173-Using-Metadata) says Administrators can create/manage templates from the Admin Console, but I cannot see where that is in my personal account. How do I enable that feature..?
ps. I don't believe a simple sort is useful since I requested a way to look across my entire portfolio (multiple folders).
Thanks!
FYI, our IT department (UBit) independently discovered a workaround for this weakness.
It doesn't sort by size, but will help locate the largest files.
While logged in to your Box account, click in the Search Options icon in the search bar at the top. A box will drop down with Content Filters that you can select. In the ‘Owners’ field, enter your own email address. Under ‘File Type(s)’ select Files. Once those options are entered, click on the magnifying glass in the search bar and a list of all files that you are the owner of will appear.
There will be tabs across the top, and one is Size. You can select to show only 1GB+, 100MB to 1GB, etc.
Make sure you are in List view rather than Grid view. Grid view won't tell you where the file is located.
A related note - deleted files stay in the Box Trash folder for 30 days, and will continue to count towards your quota until they are purged.
This is a good workaround. However, it did not work for me to set Owner(s) to my email address, I had to type my full name, and then Box added an item that included my name and email address in that setting. Only then did the search find anything.
Unfortunately, this did not solve my problem, as the most space is taken up by different versions of the same file, for some medium-sized files I had 60+ versions stored, which sums up to a large amount of space. The search results only list the size of the latest version of a file; I would have wanted to (also) see the total size of all the stored versions.
Now I am looking for a way to crop a stored file to its latest two or three versions, but the only way I have found is to copy the file to a new file name, and then delete the old file with all the versions. This only saves the latest version. And, of course, this requires that you have space available to copy the file.
That thing about deleted files living on for 30 days is also unfortunate. I need to recover space now so that I can upload new course material. There must be some way of cleaning out the waste basket.
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