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Tool to generate reports on file contents of a folder?

M

Mushkins

Golden Member
Hi all. I'm currently making a push to get everyone in my company to take a look at our network shares and do some cleanup (there's some stuff on there dating back to 2001😵). In order to put some emphasis on getting this done from the managers, I wanted to include some hard and fast numbers in my request. Things like "there are over 2000 files from before 2006 in the presentations folder" or "there are 365 duplicate files on the T drive." or even better, "here's a list of all files on the server created over 4 years ago."

Putting this information together via windows built in tools is a huge pain, its an extremely manual approach.

I'm sure there are a million file management tools out there, any recommendations?
 
Good luck. In most cases it cheaper to just add more disk. Use deduplication on Server 2012 etc. I have used WinDirStat and duplicate file finder in the past but found moving to 2012 more cost effective in the long run and robocopy to handle moving files based on LAD.
 
seems pretty trivial to use any scripting language (i prefer python) to do this.

use the os.walk module. should be pretty easy.
 
ForumMaster said:
seems pretty trivial to use any scripting language (i prefer python) to do this.

use the os.walk module. should be pretty easy.
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Yup. Powershell, VBS, Lua, Ruby, PHP, etc., can also be made to do with with relative ease. Just format the output as well-formed CSV, and then you can crunch the numbers with any tool you like, however you'd like to do it, from a SQL database down to loops in a batch file. You could even do it all in javascript.

You will want to get file name, location ( a complete path, then "walking" by each \ or / found, might be easiest), size, creation time, mod time, and access time (if available), and then probably build out the total folder size trees from the lists of contents. Python or Ruby would likely be at least as easy, if not easier, to make the summary info with, than a spreadsheet, unless you're an Excel wiz, as they both have good support built in for string manipulation, lists, dicts, and arbitrary-sized integers.
 
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Yeah, I could sit there and do it all with scripts and spend an afternoon trying to make it look pretty in excel, I just figured this is a pretty common thing for simple software that already exists to do. It's not that we're running out of space, otherwise i'd just add more disks, there's just *so much junk*. We're talking Word templates from 1996 and old client documents from pre-2000. And none of it is organized (which is a people problem, not a tech problem). I see people waste so much time scrolling through hundreds and hundreds of documents we simply do not need anymore to find the one they do, and a cleanup effort is a good way to segue into user training on proper document management so it doesnt get this bad again, but I digress.

WinDirStat gets *close* to the functionality that i'm looking for. Its great for finding orphaned files that I know I can delete, its just the advanced functionality that's lacking: for example it'll tell me there's 119 PDF files on the network totalling 35MB, which is 0.02% of the total space. Will it give me a list of those PDF files? Nope, but if I click it it'll highlight them in the little picture of squares and I can manually click each one to see what it is! Which is a huge waste of time when it could just list them out so I can go through them or print off the list.
 
Mushkins said:
WinDirStat gets *close* to the functionality that i'm looking for. Its great for finding orphaned files that I know I can delete, its just the advanced functionality that's lacking: for example it'll tell me there's 119 PDF files on the network totalling 35MB, which is 0.02% of the total space. Will it give me a list of those PDF files? Nope, but if I click it it'll highlight them in the little picture of squares and I can manually click each one to see what it is! Which is a huge waste of time when it could just list them out so I can go through them or print off the list.
Click to expand...

Submit a patch ;^)

Or at least a feature request. That would be nice functionality.
 
lxskllr said:
What about using powershell scripts to get the data, then organizing it in a spreadsheet?
Click to expand...

This is basically what I do. Just go to DOS shell and dir > txt.txt

You can throw all the switches you want into the dir command to make it less work in excel, then just do txt to columns and manipulate the data as you want
 
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