forester info

This command gets you an overview of folder contents. It shows the number of files and folders within each subfolder as well as the newest modification time of any file within the subfolder.

$ forester info --max-depth=1 /usr
Scanned 7909 folders

Folder                                                 # Folders        # Files              m_time
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
src                                                            1              0 2014-02-24 08:35:16
share                                                      2,992         66,927 2019-12-26 23:57:06
local                                                         24             71 2020-01-12 02:22:42
lib32                                                          1              7 2019-11-17 22:11:33
lib                                                        4,126         40,189 2020-01-12 09:53:20
include                                                      757         15,106 2019-12-26 23:55:09
bin                                                            7          2,306 2020-01-12 09:53:20
====================================================================================================
.                                                          7,909        124,608 2020-01-12 09:53:20

forester contribs

This command details out how much space is taken by each subfolder within a specified directory.

$ forester contribs /mnt/backup2/incremental/
Scanned 1115109 inodes
Folder                                        Total size (B)     Size of unique inodes (B)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2020-01-03                                   549,046,832,496                24,730,165,983
2020-01-04                                   549,142,789,908                24,768,159,392
2020-01-05                                   549,257,074,836                24,823,144,884
2020-01-07                                   549,523,882,623                24,852,989,570
2020-01-06                                   549,359,066,748                24,869,062,127
2020-01-08                                   549,569,521,773                24,898,430,500
2020-01-09                                   549,614,758,102                24,942,556,198
2020-01-10                                   549,651,082,519                24,977,909,521
2020-01-11                                   549,688,306,955                25,014,918,365
2020-01-12                                   549,725,397,716                25,060,355,207
2020-01-01                                   548,898,277,694                25,743,259,501
==========================================================================================
Total                                        799,506,813,350                             -

There are two measures shown for each folder:

• Total size: This is the total size of all files within the folder as it is also returned by du.

• Size of unique inodes: This is the size of the inodes which are only linked into this folder. This excludes all files which are also hardlinked to one of the other listed folders. When deleting a folder this is the space which would be gained.

This command was created to measure how much space is taken by each snapshot within a folder with incremental backups created by rsync. Each folder contains hardlinks to the previous backups for unchanged files. With forester contribs one can see how much space is exclusively taken by one of the snapshots.