Hard Drive Storage Summaries and Totals

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#1

Hello all. So I have been using Airtable since Christmas and it is really the answer to most of what I need and I am already excited about the functionality of Airtable and how it is going to help us.

Quick back story - I work for an advertising agency as a Video Editor and I am using Airtable to create a database to monitor a number of things, including the projects we are working on, which hard drive they are on and how big the projects are (amongst many other features I have found on Airtable). So far what I have is one database, which has a table which monitors the projects - location, size, external links, etc - and another table which monitors the hard drives we use - so this records the data capacity, how much is used/available etc.

I found a really helpful article to help me calculate the data available on each drive here (Forumla to add Hard Drive sizes) and it works perfectly in giving me the data on how much space is on each drive. In short, this formula helps to calculate the drive space and manages to convert all of the data types such as MBs, GBs and TBs, which is really helpful.

As part of my job I need to predict how much space we will need in order to buy more drives as jobs come in, so it would be great to have some sort of dashboard view of how much space we currently use of our capacity and how much is available compared to that. I have tried a couple of tutorials where you make a rollup or formula to calculate the sum total of one column, but none seem to work. I would imagine the above tutorial with converting the file types, could be why the rollups or formula’s aren’t working to give me correct value (usually coming back as 0).

Does anyone know of a way that I can calculate the total of three things individually; Total Capacity of the drives (from one column), Total Used Capacity of the drives (from one column) and the Total Available Capacity of the drives (from one column)? I feel like I have hit a brick wall a bit and I am swimming in the deep end of a world that I know very little about.

If there is anyone that knows of a workaround or technique I would be truly grateful.

#2

Hey Paul, how do you current enter your data? By a plane text field? Or do you actually enter bytes? How do you roll up your data in the other table?

#3

Hey, thanks for your reply! I hope this makes sense…

So far using the tutorial I posted above (which creates a formula to list data in MB, GB and TB but also to add all of that together and give you a final result per entry) I have the following:

Column A - Capacity of drive - this is a single-line text entry
Column B - Used capacity of drive - this is a single-line text entry
Column C - Total bytes - this is a formula which subtracts B from A and gives a byte version of that answer (ie it’s a large number)
Column D - Label - this is a formula which uses an IF statement to calculate the proper size using an identifier, ie, back to GB or TB (pretty clever and well done to the author of the tutorial - it’s amazing)
Column E - Available capacity of drive - which is a formula that uses a ROUND statement to calculate how much room is left on the drive.

The piece of the puzzle that is missing is being able to calculate all of that for all the drives on the base, and if you have any workarounds, I am all ears!

Thanks

#4

So essentially you have all this on one table? For multiple drives? You need another table, with like a single line, something like “company”, and all relevant fields roll up to that single record item, once totals for everything you can slice and dice, averages, calculate when you’ll need new drives etc

#5

Yes, exactly that. I need one place which can total up all the capacities in one place, and I would imagine a new table would be the place to do that. Problem is when I try to total all of that up using a rollup or a formula all I seem to get is 0. I don’t know of the formula to convert the data sizes (ie from MB to GB, etc) is messing that up? and if so how to get around that.