File purge - Time scales?

[RJohnson91]

Hi all,

 

I am looking to do a site wide file purge.

 

The specifics of this purge is 'any file that is more than 4 years old and hasn't been accessed will be deleted.

 

I have excluded Finance, HR and the exec head's PA from this purge just in case.

 

My question to you guys is:

 

Have you done a file purge

 

If so, what was your criteria?

 

We don't have folder space quotas so we've shot ourselves in the foot really, we are now running out of space!

 

Ryan

[3s-gtech]

If you do this, I recommend a slight deviation. We have a big bad NAS which we dump all of this stuff to, retaining folder structure. It can then sit there for a further x years, before being purged entirely. Without this, you run the risk of being smooshed like a bug when you delete somebody's long forgotten performance management paperwork or some such. If they don't miss it once it has been archived for years, you can ditch it.

 

Obviously there's an extra cost element, but you should only need to do it once (and we're not talking big money).

Edited March 20, 2017 by 3s-gtech
fat fingers

[Joanne]

Yeah I archive on a USB HDD attached to the server. I archive photos and videos from previous school year and search for any large files and make a decision on that basis.

[RJohnson91]

Thanks for the replies.

 

I was considering an Archive box, we have a NAS box that we no longer use now we do Azure backups.

 

So I think i'll purpose that, better to use it!

 

Ryan

[psydii]

If you are already using the cloud, why do this? Storage is cheap, Online it is free: Google is unlimited, Office365 give 1Tb per user.

 

Data is retained according to the schedule managed by the person responsible for that data within the organisation. If data needs to be archived and kept safe bu not immediately accessible we have a tracking sheet and processes. For everything else there are the shared drives with departmental folders and a backup schedule. If it is on disk at the end of the year, it will definitely be on tape for another two years.

 

We've got stuff going back well over a decade. The old stuff is not what is taking the space!

 

 

If you don't have quotas then it is likely most of your space is being consumed by Photos (staff) and games (the kids). Use FSRM to locate folders containing games etc, and purge those by hand. Then instruct staff (and Students) to move their photos to their Google for Education Drive / OneDrive for Business cloud storage.

 

If you have shared folders for classes, consider using Google / Microsoft Classroom /Class Notebooks instead. If you don't already use them Salamander can help get classes/courses provisioned automatically.

Edited March 20, 2017 by psydii

[RJohnson91]

If you are already using the cloud, why do this? Storage is cheap, Online it is free: Google is unlimited, Office365 give 1Tb per user.

 

Data is retained according to the schedule managed by the person responsible for that data within the organisation. If data needs to be archived and kept safe bu not immediately accessible we have a tracking sheet and processes. For everything else there are the shared drives with departmental folders and a backup schedule. If it is on disk at the end of the year, it will definitely be on tape for another two years.

 

We've got stuff going back well over a decade. The old stuff is not what is taking the space!

 

 

If you don't have quotas then it is likely most of your space is being consumed by Photos (staff) and games (the kids). Use FSRM to locate folders containing games etc, and purge those by hand. Then instruct staff (and Students) to move their photos to their Google for Education Drive / OneDrive for Business cloud storage.

 

If you have shared folders for classes, consider using Google / Microsoft Classroom /Class Notebooks instead. If you don't already use them Salamander can help get classes/courses provisioned automatically.

 

 

Hiya,

 

We are in the transition process regarding Office 365, staff will have educational Office365 accounts, however for the moment they do not, this is also the case for Microsoft Classroom, so this process is to 'ready ourselves' for the transition.

 

Our end goal is to have full cloud based systems, however for the time being this is not feasible.

 

We have a media drive for all media objects and do script based scanning for student drives, all games, mp3s etc are deleted every night, we are using TBs of space and Treesize tells us that over 75% of those files are over 5 years old.

 

So for now I think a purge/archive is the way to go, then put quotas in place.

 

Ryan