Size of a sharepoint web application

Question

How do you figure out the current size of the sharepoint web application? Better yet, the size of a site collection or a subsite.

I am planning to move a site collection from one farm to another. I need to plan the storage capacity first.

Answer 1

All content for SharePoint is stored in Content Database (unless you are using some sort of 3rd party external BLOB provider).

A site collection (aka top level site) is stored in a single content database but each content database can have multiple site collections.

• You can work out the site of the content databases using SQL Management Studio, stored procedures (though beware that these can include overhead like logfiles or allocated but unused space)

• You can use the open source SPUsedSpaceInfo utility

• You can use free tools like BLOBulator.

• Programatically you can loop through the folders and subwebs of an SPWeb and add up the size of all the contents

These are going to give slightly different results -e.g. one is looking at the size of documents stored, the other is the size of the content database storing those documents. None of these is going to include the files in C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\80 or C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12 but these are nearly always insignificant compared to the size of the documents stored in SharePoint.