Preventing anarchy of shared folder

[unixman_again]

A common scenario is a shared area on a network (or several) which the various departments use as a dumping ground for their files, so that each person in the dept can access them. The problem is, that over time, as people leave the area becomes full of stuff that nobody knows what it is. Basically nobody takes ownership of the files. Some years ago I saw some software which you could run on a shared area which would :

• archive off all files older than a specified date
  
• these archived files were moved to another area and stored in a compressed format, which preserved the path
  
• a link was placed where the file came from, which said the user needed to contact sysadmin to locate the file
  

The idea was that you to run this with a cutoff date of say 5 years and all those older files could be moved off. If after some other specified period, nobody had tried to access the old files, sysadmin could delete the links and remove the files from the archive, or move them to some hard to get at archive, like tape. Has anyone heard of some software which does this?

 

Of course, we would like to prevent this happening in the first place. Ideally we would like setup one shared area for each department and the department head will have the power to create sub-folders, which are then assigned to someone within the department. The owner can then share that to whoever. When this person leaves, sysadmin will then either delete their folder or have the department head assign the files to someone else. That way, when we check if files have not been accessed for 5 years, we can see the owner and find out if they really want to keep them. They will, of course, say "yes", but at least someone is accountable for the files. We aren't looking at handing out admin rights to the o/s, but using a package perhaps web based which will allow this. We have been playing with ownCloud which looks quite good. Any other suggestions? We want something in-house rather than Dropbox, etc.

[Gatt]

Have you got DFS?

 

I found the best way to do this was a DFS Namespace (eg \\domain\shared_folders) and then create the shares inside the namespace and enabled Access Based Enumeration on the folders so that the root was locked out, and the could only get read/write to their departments folder (rest were Read Only - with SLT and the IT folders hidden to all but IT and SLT)

[mjs_mjs]

as @Gatt said - you can also do this effectively but allowing everyone access a folder - you create the folders within, then remove the allowed to create folders from the top level folder for all users other than a select few, thus you control the top level folders but users can do as they please within the folders.

 

• archive off all files older than a specified date
  
• these archived files were moved to another area and stored in a compressed format, which preserved the path
  
• a link was placed where the file came from, which said the user needed to contact sysadmin to locate the file
  

 

I have a script/batch file to do the first - and the second minus the compression - i don't think it'ld be to hard to modify to get it to do the later for you also....

 

xcopy C:\VM's* E:\Backup\%date:~6,4%-%date:~3,2%-%date:~0,2%\VM's\* /Y /Q /S /D:01-01-2013

 

EDIT : - just watch out for reversed or UK/US date formats.

Edited February 21, 2014 by mjs_mjs