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Author Topic: DelEmpty and a 137GB Data Archive  (Read 4523 times)

PlayPhil

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DelEmpty and a 137GB Data Archive
« on: May 08, 2007, 07:30 PM »
Recently built a new box for a family member (XpPro + Vizduh ready) replacing one I had built for them about 6-7 years ago (W2K). We live quite a distance apart so I sent an external 160GB USB drive to get a copy of all their data.

You can't imagine my surprise when it came back with 137GB of data, ~90,000 files. Exploring thru the structure I could see they had multilple copies of many files, empty directories all over the place, horrendously long path names, in short, a mess, but at least they did backups.

Sifting thru this much data is a real chore (esp when it's not yours) but the empty directory situation was becoming a nightmare. I Googled for some software. Any that I liked also required .net to be installed. I don't have an issue with .net other than on this computer it will not likely ever be needed again.

After a few quick searches I figured that it was a pretty good bet that I find something on DC, found DelEmpty in a few minutes and decided to give a try. By this time I have the data size just under 40GB, mostly by removing duplicate files.

On a copy of the data structure I ran the first pass. Took a while of course, 20-25 minutes perhaps, but well worth the wait tagging 2,200+ empty directories. File count and everything else is good and I was some happy, Ok, ecstatic :)

More work, more passes, more empty directories deleted. I'm about done at 22GB of data and approximately 3,500 empty directories were deleted in the process.

This would have been an otherwise impossible task without this superb util. That it is portable and available for zip makes it pricelessware and a keeper for my toolkit.

This is my busiest time of the year, but this Winter I'll be having a serious boo at AHK...

Thanks Skrommel :)
Phil