Storman: An Old Workhorse that’s Still Valuable

There probably aren’t a lot of people who use the Storage Management page in SharePoint these days, but I find it really helpful. When we do migrations it’s invaluable, especially when we are looking at a “legacy” – read: classic – pyramid of a Site Collection, with lots of nested subsites. Sure, there are fancier tools – our favorite at Sympraxis is ShareGate Desktop – but good old storman is a great starting point.

By adding the following to a site’s URL: /_layouts/storman.aspx, you’ll see an interactive view of your storage usage for the site. You can also get to the page from the Site Settings; the path varies a bit by SharePoint version, but the link in Site Settings is usually Storage Metrics. I find it’s easier just to type the page on an existing URL for a site.

Here’s an abbreviated example from a classic site we recently worked with a client on to “flatten” the classic subsites into modern sites. (With ShareGate, of course!)

The “containers” below the site are listed in descending order of size, and you can click on any one of them to see the sizes of the content within it, if you choose, all the way to individual files.

This gives us a good high level view of which content is going to take more of our effort. Here, the Company subsite is almost twice as large as its next largest peer.

It would be great if we could choose how to sort the view or filter it, but this is a very old page that Microsoft included first with SharePoint 2007, if I’m not mistaken.

Want to understand where your bigger challenges are going to be as you move from classic to modern or move content around in your modern sites? Storman can be a great help.