How to clean the file server?

Question

System administration

There is a file server which is about 15 years old. Not a garbage dump, but over the course of his life he got crammed with unnecessary rubbish. The idea was born to transfer files with a modification time of more than 5 years ago to a separate archive folder with the structure and access rights preserved, but with the inability to edit. This would reduce the cost of backup and simplify, perhaps, the search for information on the server.

Has anyone done something similar? Interested in the administrative side of the issue, maybe I missed something and this solution is not viable? What software / script is better to do this?

Answer 1

You can use robocopy

Answer 2

quite viable, although you can mess with the rights in Windows yourself))
you can use total commander,
you can use backup software

Answer 3

Normal solution. Set the rights with the cacls.exe utility (Included in the delivery of windows)

This would help reduce backup costs.

It's right

and simplify, perhaps, the search for information on the server.

But this is not true. If indexing is running on the server, then the search will be almost instantaneous through the explorer. If you turned it off, then the search goes through all the files, which is generally not true.

Answer 4

The solution to the problem of a clogged server with rubbish is solved more by administrative methods. Those. file owners themselves must decide whether they need something on the server or not.
If no one needed the files for several years, they are definitely not needed at all, at least they need to be moved to the archive. Only now, the file modification time, unfortunately, is not such a metric, you need to take the time of the last read access ... and if the content was searched earlier, then this metric will show not what is expected, but the time of the last search, but it’s still better to use her.
Well, of course, you can go through the files by their types, if there are video files or personal photos in the exchange folder (there are typical file names), this is at least a reason to inform their owners about it, let them clean it up.
ps there is an architect friend, she has a personal working archive of almost a hundred gigabytes of documents, ten years old, no garbage and random videos .. so she had examples of using files from a project with almost 5 years ago, and if they were not it would have been a lot of extra work to do.

Answer 5

you take gnu-shny find from Linux (I didn’t find anything convenient for Windows)
through it you form a script to move old files to a separate dira and change rights.
put the script in the task scheduler for monthly launch

Answer 6

Another (separate topic) is data deduplication. On office junk, it gives from 50 to 80% savings in occupied space.