Windows 10: Best way to Clean-up a huge File Structure keeping only the good.

Doing this manually is nearly impossible. The folder structure contains over 160,000 files that have accumulated over many years. Less than half of these need to be kept. But they are buried among all the other files that need to be removed.

I think it might be possible using some vartiation of robocopy to move only the specified filetypes from folder A to folder B and create the entire path as it moved the files. I don't know what combination of switches would be needed to accomplish this though and it is important that the original folder structure be maintained.

After I have moved as many types as i can think of, I could examine what was left in folder A to see if I missed anything. If anyone knows of a utility or tool made to do this I would appreciate the name*Smile

:)

 

Best way to Clean-up a huge File Structure keeping only the good.


Doing this manually is nearly impossible. The folder structure contains over 160,000 files that have accumulated over many years. Less than half of these need to be kept. But they are buried among all the other files that need to be removed.

I think it might be possible using some vartiation of robocopy to move only the specified filetypes from folder A to folder B and create the entire path as it moved the files. I don't know what combination of switches would be needed to accomplish this though and it is important that the original folder structure be maintained.

After I have moved as many types as i can think of, I could examine what was left in folder A to see if I missed anything. If anyone knows of a utility or tool made to do this I would appreciate the name*Smile

 

Best way to Clean-up a huge File Structure keeping only the good.

Please provide an example and we'll create the robocopy command/commands.
PowerShell can also be very helpful in filtering and copying file types.

 

Best way to Clean-up a huge File Structure keeping only the good.

I think I'd use the older Xcopy for this (in fact, I have) as RoboCopy needs a few more switches to cope with unexpected things like junction points or locked files. It's defaults can be less than useful in such circumstances. I wrote myself a 'user files backup' batch file with RoboCopy and until I got the switches right it could hang or go into an infinite loop.


Both RoboCopy and Xcopy have a /S option that will copy subdirectories. For Xcopy a simple command to copy all .mp4 files from folder A and recreate the folder structure in Folder B would be:

XCOPY /S "Folder A\*.mp4" "Folder B\"