Re: Finding Unused Files For a Specific Time

criscabellos · ‎2016-05-05

Hello everyone!

I have a FAS2050 and would like to know if there is a way to search through all my volumes at once for files that are old (let's say more than 3 years old) and that have not been accessed by anyone or any system since, let's say, for a year or even three years.

My storage has a lot of data, and a lot of old data. I can't afford to expand my storage and need to delete those really old files that no one has had the need to even open it.

My users can't and won't (they really don't care if I run out of space) go by themselves deleting those old files.

So what I need is a way to search and find all my old files given a time period (older than three years) and that have not been accessed since one or more years. Then a way to delete all of them at once as well.

If not possible, I'm open for suggestions on how to better deal with my situation.

Thanks in advance for your time.

Cristian

P.S.: I wasn't too sure if this was the right place to post this, so if not the right place I'm sorry and please let me know where is the right place to do so.

JamesIlderton · ‎2016-05-05

You should checkout http://www.foldersizes.com/ - pretty good at gathering details from any local or UNC path and building reports. The trick is you can look for files not MODIFIED in the last 3 years, but I'm not aware of an easy way to see the last READ date. There are most costly indexing systems, but then you're talking about something that could cost more than simply buying an aftermarket disk shelf and expanding your storage. Hope this help.

criscabellos · ‎2016-05-09

Hi James, Thanks for your reply, but this doesn't help me. I really wanted something to search for unread/not accessed documents instead of modified. And something that could be done directly with Data Ontap commands instead of using third party/outsourced softwares. Regards, Cristian

nigelg1965 · ‎2016-05-09

Check out products from JAM Software http://www.jam-software.com http://www.jam-software.com

For free you can use their filelist utility to get an CSV file. Tip if you've Mac users pick a very obscure delimiter, we've apple users you like to put commas in filenames!

The pay for product Treesize Pro has a search mode, allowing you to find files based on size, any of the date fields, names etc.

This works at a share / volume level, but could create a DFS tree of the shares and search that.