Mass deletion of old/duplicate files on shared drive

[farquea]

We have a shared drive which staff are free to create folders and save documents to. They was/is some basic folder structure but its a bit of a mess.

I started moving anything i deemed obsolete into a hidden folder and then clear out this folder each year in case anyone comes asking for missing work.

I want to know if there is a tool or an easy way to search say all files and folders not accessed in a set time frame, say 2 years, so that i can then move them to a hidden folder before deleting them. There is also the problem of duplicate files floating around which i'd like to delete as well. I've seen a few tools to find and delete them, but can anyone reccommend something they have used successfully?

[p858snake]

You could probably do it with a batch/powershell script.

But for images, I like to use VisiPics to find duplicates.

[teejay]

Robocopy will do this, it would be something like (but please check this before using):

Robocopy s:\staff\*.* s:\archive\*.* /E /MOVE /MINAGE:730

[teejay]

For duplicate files, bit of a pain, but you could do:

dir *.* /S /OS > files.txt

This will give you a list of all files sorted by size, it's then a case of hunt for files the same size and name, bit manual I know.

[bossman]

@farquea:

Excellent piece of software but not free:

Duplicate File Detective Software - Find and Remove Duplicate Files

Does what it states

[kili]

I would recommend treesize for any system admin a very useful tool

[thepineapplehead]

i may have used that one, some of them come with an option to delete the dupe and replace it witha shortcut to the original file.

[apeo]

Seems like deleteman is advertising, given that the response is to a post in Feb 2011!

[thepineapplehead]

oh bloody hell, now I just look ridiculous