Colin, 

EVERYBODY struggles with this and other storage issues, and there are tools available that can help, some from a legacy perspective and some from a point forward perspective.  

From a legacy perspective (to reduce storage) de-duplicating tools are one option. It helps to find a tool that can compare duplicates (and near duplicates) among multiple sources.  (That way you can compare workstations versus servers) There are also Index and Classification Management (ICM) tools that we use to find a large variety of eTrash files and other things that should not be stored on shares, even though they may be useful.  If a big company has 100TB and 10% is garbage, they are spending ~$800,000 per year to store that garbage (based on Gartner stats) so there are some good reasons to address this issue. 

From a point forward perspective, (to avoid having people saving stuff to workstations) some of these tools provide for "agents" to run on the workstation so that files placed there automatically get captured and categorized. You could also consider ECRM for the more important or frequently misplaced files. 

There is an article (by me) in the latest Information Management mag from ARMA and a corresponding webinar at ARMA that touches on some of these issues. 

Brian Tuemmler
Director, Gimmal
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