Keeping Staff Shared Drives Clean?

[farquea]

We have a teachers shared drive and an admin staff shared drive. I want to keep it up to date and free of clutter and my line manager also is always asking for it to be "cleaned"

 

Can anyone suggest a way to go about this? I ideally would just like to move all files and folders that have not been accessed in the last 1 or 2 years to a hidden folder there and eventually deleted a year later from the hidden folder after being backed up to a tape.

 

Anyone?

[AWicher]

We have the same problem, one of the solutions i'm hoping to setup one day is MS Sharepoint.

 

Going From The Shared Drive to SharePoint | NLC BLOG

[zag]

I'm always secretly cleaning the staff shared drive

 

- I resize all photos uploaded with the windows 7 powertool resizer.

- I also move all videos to our video share.

- The odd moan at people who create backups on it or do stupid things on it.

 

I use windirsat to identify stuff.

 

Keeps it down to about 60gb so its pretty good.

[Little-Miss]

I created them all an individual folder and one for their year group. They can only save into those folders and they cannot create any new folders....gives the illusion of organisation anyway! lol

[SpuffMonkey]

Remove write access

[Asreal]

I occasionally spend a few days every now and then doing what Zag said:

 

The 'Photographs' folder is always one to target with digital cameras defaulting to taking shots (unlikely to be used for promotion/print purposes if ever) too big to fit on the screen that can be anything from 2 - 5mb.

My own rule of thumb is to resize the image so that it can fit on the screen (or to around 800k-ish), as such I've got actions and batch conversions setup in photoshop to do this for me en masse (open file > scale down to 30% > save/close etc).

 

Video clips are another beauty. These I'll encode as divx's with Super- (again, you can do batches) the only problem with doing all this is that it ties up your machine.

 

The other one is massive Word documents - people inserting said 2mb images into a Word doc without resizing them first. The worst offenders I open up, go format > compress all pictures - but this is annoying because you can't do it by the batch =./

[TechMonkey]

Ctrl-a. Shift-Del. All nice and clean.

 

(Can you tell I'm not in a good mood?)

[srochford]

The other one is massive Word documents - people inserting said 2mb images into a Word doc without resizing them first. The worst offenders I open up, go format > compress all pictures - but this is annoying because you can't do it by the batch =./

 

http://www.edugeek.net/blogs/srochford/278-making-word-files-smaller.html is something I wrote quite a while ago that includes a script to scan a folder tree and convert any .doc files to .docx - these are effectively ZIP files so you get the compression without having to do the work :-)

 

A problem I used to have with a shared drive was that a folder would be setup for a purpose (eg a 1 year course), used for that year but, of course, at the end of the year everything was just left. We had a web page that listed all the folders and once a year people would be asked to claim ownership of folders. Any that weren't claimed within (say) a month were archived and then deleted once a suitable time had gone past to allow people to realise that the folder had gone.

[Asreal]

http://www.edugeek.net/blogs/srochford/278-making-word-files-smaller.html is something I wrote quite a while ago that includes a script to scan a folder tree and convert any .doc files to .docx - these are effectively ZIP files so you get the compression without having to do the work :-)

 

Very handy!! Thanks very much ^_^

[rvdmast]

start of each year, i run a RoboCopy script that moves all files older than 356 days from \\server\share to \\server\archive.

Users hav read-only access for one month to \\server\archive so they can copy back things they might still need.

After a month, \\server\archive is removed from the network and archived to DVD.

 

To keep them from just copying everything back, there are file quota's in place and file screens that disallow photo's images, movies and other stuff. For that we have a youtube-like server.

[farquea]

start of each year, i run a RoboCopy script that moves all files older than 356 days from \\server\share to \\server\archive.

Users hav read-only access for one month to \\server\archive so they can copy back things they might still need.

After a month, \\server\archive is removed from the network and archived to DVD.

 

To keep them from just copying everything back, there are file quota's in place and file screens that disallow photo's images, movies and other stuff. For that we have a youtube-like server.

 

any chance you could send me the script so i can have a look at it?

[Gatt]

I find Cillit Bang works quite well....

Keeps the drive nice and shiny and clean and also denies write access across the disk..

[p858snake]

My post in another thread on the subject: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/network-classroom-management/72073-eradicating-staff-shared-drive.html#post642986

[rvdmast]

It's really just a single Robocopy command:

 

robocopy.exe "E:\Shared\Documents\Staff" "E:\Shared\Archive2009-2010\Staff" *.* /S /COPY:DATSO /MOVE /ZB /NP /XA:RHS /XF *.ini *.ico /MINAGE:365 /R:2 /W:10

[farquea]

It's really just a single Robocopy command:

 

robocopy.exe "E:\Shared\Documents\Staff" "E:\Shared\Archive2009-2010\Staff" *.* /S /COPY:DATSO /MOVE /ZB /NP /XA:RHS /XF *.ini *.ico /MINAGE:365 /R:2 /W:10

 

im assuming this doesnt keep any kind of folder structure and just dumps files into a folder?

[zag]

robocopy.exe "E:\Shared\Documents\Staff" "E:\Shared\Archive2009-2010\Staff" *.* /S /COPY:DATSO /MOVE /ZB /NP /XA:RHS /XF *.ini *.ico /MINAGE:365 /R:2 /W:10

 

Just tested it on my mirrored file server and it keeps the directory structure.

 

AWESOME script!

 

Now to run it on the main T: drive share and see if anyone notices

Edited March 30, 2011 by zag

[enjay]

Not sure how popular I'd be if I moved every old file - the fact that something is old doesn't mean it isn't vital (only today, I transferred some PDFs which the Deputy had just been sent, and they were 2 years old).

 

I stumbled across a product called WinQuota once which would allow disk quotas on shared areas thus putting the responsibility onto departments to manage their own space - not had a chance to look at it properly, but it sounds good in theory.

[plexer]

I shall be running this on Friday, warned the staff at the beginning of the week that anything that hasn't been used since 2009 is being removed.

 

Ben

[zag]

I ran the script for anything over 5 years old on our shared drives and saved about 20% of the entire space.

 

I keep all the files in an archive just in case someone wants them.

[enjay]

I shall be running this on Friday, warned the staff at the beginning of the week that anything that hasn't been used since 2009 is being removed.

 

Careful - a file date of 2008 doesn't mean it hasn't been used since then, just that it hasn't been saved since then.

[plexer]

Which is why I'll use the last accessed date.

 

Ben

[enjay]

Which is why I'll use the last accessed date.

 

Now, that I would be interested in. Do you have a script which would do that? My understanding was that the one above looks at the created/modified date...

[Steve21]

Now, that I would be interested in. Do you have a script which would do that? My understanding was that the one above looks at the created/modified date...

 

There's an option default in Win7 that normally has the "accessed" time set to disabled. But you can enable it using 'fsutil behavior set disablelastaccess 0' if it's disabled. And then enable it in the normal "More details" page in a folder.

 

Do you care what type of script it is? vbs? bat? etc If not could try knocking one up for you

 

Steve

[enjay]

Currently XP but going Win7 in the summer (it would be nice to have it tidy before then, mind you, to speed the migration!). Not too fussed on script format, no - so long as it does the job, I don't see it matters much.

[plexer]

Looks like the above robocopy command can be tweaked:

 

/MAXLAD:n : MAXimum Last Access Date - exclude files unused since n.

/MINLAD:n : MINimum Last Access Date - exclude files used since n.

 

Taken from:

 

Robocopy

 

Ben