The File Fabric unifies private / public storage assets for a company and enables these assets to be accessible from a single entry point, be this through a web browser or through a desktop integrated drive or mobile application.
The File Fabric ships with Audit Event logging that can be integrated with Syslog or that is available as an Audit Stream to plug into solutions such as Elk Stack and Apache Spark.
Whereas the Audit log validates the integrity of the various file events it can present a lot of information and sometimes the ask is a lot simpler such as a directory listing for a companies data assets that are exposed through the File Fabric and that may live locally on site and/or in the Cloud.
This post will highlight the various ways this can be achieved.
The easiest way to get a visual overview of the directory structures for the various storage assets exposed through the File Fabric is to simply use the Tree command from the File Fabric’s network drive.
As an example from a Windows Powershell or Command prompt you can enter the following command to export the tree view into a text file:
tree <network drive letter ie. S:\> /a /f > treeview.txt
This will result in the tree command recursively navigating through the various storage assets which will transparently communicate with the File Fabric’s REST API’s to pull back the latest listing from each storage endpoint and thereby output the tree view of the various storage assets.
You can also be a little more advanced with Powershell and recursively export the entire file list rand make it available as a .csv file which can then be pulled into excel. To do this again drop out to Powershell and type the following:
Get-ChildItem '<network drive>' -Recurse -Force | Select-Object Fullname, name | Export-Csv -path <Destination Path + filename> -noTypeInfo
This output each file details into CSV and this can be directly opened from Excel.
Lastly we are going to take a look at an App that can be run on Mac and Windows and which can be used to output entire File Fabric directory listings directly to .txt, .csv .xlsx and html.
The application is called FileListCreator.
Using this App the end user chooses the network drive and the export format that is required for the listing ie. txt, csv, xlsx etc.
Note that the app can generate a ‘this app is not responding message’ from Windows as it trawls the various storage assets but click to ‘wait’ and it will eventually complete:







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