Article: Force Disk Usage Refresh on QNAP

I can’t tell you how many times I have looked at the resources page of my QNAP NAS only to be left wondering how much space I have left after some large transfers.  Unfortunately, QNAP did not build in a manual refresh option for the storage on your NAS. As always, there are a couple of ways you can do this.

You can refresh the disk usage for each folder through the web admistration by accessing the Share Folders section of Access Right Management and pressing the refresh button next to each folder. This can become a time consuming process…

If you have ssh access configured on your NAS, you can tackle this problem very easily.  All you need to do to see what your space allocation looks like is run a simple command from the command line and voila, you have your disk usage. (we use putty: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html)

To refresh the resources tab in your NAS administration or the amount of space represented in your Shared Folder section of Access Right Management, just type the following command at the command prompt.

/sbin/vs_refresh

If you are afraid of forcing a refresh, you can get your disk usage breakdown by running some simple Linux commands.

At the command prompt type

df -h

the output will look something like this:

<br />Filesystem Size Used Available Use% Mounted on<br />/dev/ramdisk 139.5M 111.5M 28.0M 80% /<br />tmpfs 64.0M 236.0k 63.8M 0% /tmp<br />/dev/sda4 310.0M 233.7M 76.3M 75% /mnt/ext<br />/dev/md9 509.5M 92.8M 416.7M 18% /mnt/HDA_ROOT<br />/dev/md0 7.2T 6.5T 737.9G 90% /share/MD0_DATA<br />tmpfs 32.0M 5.2M 26.8M 16% /.eaccelerator.tmp<br />

Where /dev/md0 represents the amount of space you have available to you.

If you are looking for greater detail:

cd /share/MD0_DATA

du -sh *

The output would look like

4.9G Business<br />13G Documents<br />55G Download<br />12K homes<br />16K lost+found<br />4.3T Movies<br />32M Multimedia<br />187G Music<br />26M Network Recycle Bin<br />17G Photos<br />39G Public<br />31G Recordings<br />6.9G ServerBackup<br />220G Software<br />580G System<br />1.2T Television<br />8.0K Usb<br />105M Web<br />

If you want to completely customize your QNAP’s resource page to include a refresh button, I have scoured the web and retrieved for you a nice tutorial from tarfu.se and a QPKG that he created: http://www.tarfu.se/component/simpledownload/?task=download&fileid=cmVmcmVzaC92c19yZWZyZXNoXzAuMS5xcGtn