topic How to gather information about the files which are not being used for months or years in ONTAP Discussions

How to gather information about the files which are not being used for months or years

US — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 10:04:27 GMT

Hi ,

I need to know if there is a way to gather information about the files CIFS/NFS which are not being touched for months or years by users. Is there a third party tool which we can use to retrieve all this information?

Thank you!

Re: How to gather information about the files which are not being used for months or years

maffo — Wed, 23 Feb 2022 18:37:58 GMT

I can't comment on CIFS/SMB but for NFS it should just be matter of checking mtime (last modified time) or atime (last accessed time) of a file from a host.

Be mindful that some hosts might mount NFS with "noatime" option, so atime won't get updated when the file is accessed.

Re: How to gather information about the files which are not being used for months or years

parisi — Thu, 24 Feb 2022 14:59:42 GMT

File Systems Analytics in ONTAP 9.8 and later have REST API support that you can use to query this info.

Otherwise, XCP can be used to do this. There's an example in this blog:

https://storageexorcist.wordpress.com/2020/11/04/netapp-ontap-9-8-fabricpool-tiering-to-ontap-s3/

Re: How to gather information about the files which are not being used for months or years

US — Fri, 11 Mar 2022 20:13:45 GMT

Hi Parisi,

Thank you for this information. I am sorry if I wasn't specific in my question. Actually we have 7-mode 8.1.4P10 Netapp filers. What we are trying is to collect information all stale data/files in those filers, so we can delete them. would XCP provide this information? if not, do you know if there is any other software in the market which we can use and collect this information.

Thank you!

Re: How to gather information about the files which are not being used for months or years

kilobyte — Mon, 14 Mar 2022 06:04:11 GMT

Data Advantage from Varonis crawls cifs shares, and lets you report on stale data, etc.

Re: How to gather information about the files which are not being used for months or years

parisi — Mon, 14 Mar 2022 13:03:06 GMT

XCP doesn't care about underlying storage (it just uses the NAS protocols), so 7-Mode would work fine.