geek-oriented / find # times & type of file accessed on hard disk?

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ATP

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Hello all.

I have been working very hard on what I hope is the last bit of hard disk overhaul for many a year to come.

I would like to know if a computer's system tracks/logs things like type of file, # times accessed it in the course of a year, its size, location & things like this.

For example, I am interested to determine if the overhaul has resulted in increased overall frequency of accessing files, and if so, if there has been an increase useage in relation to specific files.

Is there a section in the software which does this type of recording? If not, where might I go to get such software which does?

Thanks.
 

Priene

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I've never heard of such a thing. You'd be requiring the operating system to do file system operations every time a file handle was opened or closed. You could probably get software which could run a trace on the number of file accesses, but that's not going to help you with what happened in the past.

But I don't understand why you think a hard disk overhaul would change the number of file accesses. The main result of hard disk clearing is you free up space and (possibly) file access times by storing files in contiguous areas of memory. The number of file accesses happen because processes access them, and that's dependant on the number of processes you have running, not the memory layout of the hard disk.
 

ATP

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I've never heard of such a thing. You'd be requiring the operating system to do file system operations every time a file handle was opened or closed. You could probably get software which could run a trace on the number of file accesses, but that's not going to help you with what happened in the past.

If I could get software to do as you suggest, then that would be a good start. Do you know what type of software this would be? What it might be called? Where such might be found?

As for the record of the past, this is ideally what I would have liked. Nice to have it if I could get such a measure.I am a bit surprised to read that the OS doesn't undertake this sort of record--recording of data I thought that is almost as second nature like breathing.

But I don't understand why you think a hard disk overhaul would change the number of file accesses. The main result of hard disk clearing is you free up space and (possibly) file access times by storing files in contiguous areas of memory. The number of file accesses happen because processes access them, and that's dependant on the number of processes you have running, not the memory layout of the hard disk.

Correct. The thing implicit here is user behaviour. Ideally, I would have liked a simple record of pre-intervention/change and
post-intervention/change that would have allowed me to note how the new folder and file structure (overhaul) had influenced frequency of file access (the dependent variable).
 

ATP

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Thanks much.
 
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