Need solution to monitor who access, deletes and modifies file on a fileserver. Fileserver is 2008 currently and will be Windows 2012 R2 in future

Need solution to monitor who access, deletes and modifies file on a fileserver.  Fileserver is 2008 currently and will be Windows 2012 R2 in future.  Ideally would like to not spend over $500 dollars if possible.  Have Windows auditing turned on, but only showing one days of data.

Ideally a 3rd party tool that logs shares, who accesses data and whether it was modified, deleted and or moved would be ideal  It appears the programs above only log the data and store the data.  The windows data is rather large and hard to parse though effectively.

Out of curiosity - is that a very busy server? If you up the size of the log file, can you hope to store as much data as you are required? These are the guidelines for the recommended log file sizes in Windows:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/957662

Most likely it's a low volume server.  It is a file share and print server.  The log files are pretty big for one day at a time so there may be more volume on it than I realize.

We have a series of folders that keeps disappearing forcing us to restore a backup.  That's our mystery we are trying to unravel.

I see. It could also be related to what you are auditing - not all of those events are all that useful, and usually a single user operation actually creates multiple events in the logs.

I could also suggest this software - I have trialed some of their software as well, and currently use some of the free tools they offer. You might be able to solve your problem with the 20 day trial as well: http://www.netwrix.com/file_server_reporting.html

I think that ManageEngine ADAudit will do what I need.  Thank you for your help :)

Good Luck!