As you continue to develop your site, it becomes important to keep an eye on the disk usage of that site and where all of that space is being used. Luckily, BackupBuddy, which comes with your iThemes Hosting account, has a great tool for checking on the size of your site's folders. This article will assume that you've already installed BackupBuddy on your site. You can find this site size tool by accessing your Sync Dashboard and Selecting the Full Site Details option.
From here, you will select the View WP Admin option.
Currently, the BackupBuddy Site Size Maps cannot be pulled up through Sync.
Once you get into the wp-admin area of your site, you will then locate BackupBuddy in the left-hand menu and hover there to get the additional options. When those pop up, you will select the Server Tools option.
This page contains a lot of great information that will be very helpful to you in the administration of your site. I highly recommend that you take some time to review what you find here. For the sake of this tutorial though, we are only concerned with the Site Size Maps tab.
You will then be brought to a page with two options. Display Directory Size Listing and Display Interactive Graphical Directory Size Map. Both will display the same information but in two different ways.
Site Size Listing
The Site Size Listing gives you a breakdown of the folders within your site and how much disk space is being used by them in a text table. You can look at the size of the folders in descending order with the largest folders at the top.
Now let's explain this just a little bit. Size with Children is the total amount of disk space being used within that folder and all of the folders within it. Size with Exclusions is purely a BackupBuddy thing. The exclusions are folders that are ignored in a backup and not included. So in the example above, you can see that the /wp-content/uploads/backupbuddy_backups folder is excluded. This means that while it's size is calculated in the Size with Children section, it is not calculated for the purpose of generating a backup.
You then have the Children Count (Files + Folders). This is just the total number of files and folders within the listed folder. So if you look at the /wp-content/uploads/ section, there are 780 individual files and folders located in that folder. Children with Exclusions is the same thing with the exception that if there is a folder excluded from backups then those files and folders don't count in this column.
Site Size Map
The Site Size Map gives you a graphical interface with which to review your sites folder sizes. You can then click on each folder to move to the next section and see what is in that folder and how large those are.
We can break this one down a bit more as well. The top directory there listed as / is your web root directory for this site. The larger the folder is, the more space will be taken up by the image of that folder. So as you can see in the image above the wp-content folder is extremely large compared to the others just below the / directory. If you look closely towards the top of the image, you can see the other subdirectories listed there and can hover over them to see their size. If you were to double-click on a folder, the graphics would move to that next folder and work the same way you are seeing now.
Let's select the uploads folder to show what I mean.
As you can see the first folder in place now is the uploads folder and we get to see more details of where the disk space is being used below that level. Now you can go back to higher folder levels by selecting the Go Up option.
With that bar, you also have the option to change the orientation so the folders can go either left to right or top to bottom. You can also set the Max levels that you will see on the screen at a time. In this example, it is set to 3 so you can see 3 folders down from whatever folder you have clicked on.
The Site Size Maps section of BackupBuddy can help you track down your disk usage for your account. If you wish to get information about the files that are specifically located there you will want to access this via FTP which you can use our FTP Tutorial to learn how to do that.