Moving, archiving, clearing folders of old files

Hi

Does any one know a freeware which will move files from current location to other storage location based on time stamp? for example say.. any files which is not accesed/modified for last 3 months should be move to other fileserver.

Reason for this is ..
I have volume wherein all may active data is stored. this volume has raid/shadowcopy/backup in place. The problem is that this volume get filled up very frequently, then i need to manually remove unwanted files which users have created long back and which are no more being used.. or the old data /files is no more relavent to them at this point. but this data may be required in future as reference. (only viewing)
So i need to move to a another server which has low processing but large disk space and no backup.

Software i am looking for should have..
- application can work as a clearing utility and as a system service
- it is possible to delete, copy, move, send to the Recyclebin or archiving the old files you've found;
- while moving\copying files can be compressed
- support external archivators such as WinRAR, winzip
- every folder can have the list of files, ignored during the scan process;
- it is possible to set the list of masks to search for files in the folder, for example: (*.jpg,*.bmp, *.tiff);
- the time when file becomes old can be measured in days, weeks, months, and years;
- clearing can be started every several minutes, hours or in particular time;
- creating shortcut in the work folder instead of the moved file;
- empty directories in scanned folders can be deleted;
- files' attribute "ReadOnly" can be ignored;
- clearing schedule can be set in scheduler or started the scanning by hand;
- all the program actions are taken down to the files of logs;
- with the help of files of logs it is possible to look when and what file was relocated, and recover it at the previous place;
- statistics of actions over files is run by days and months - with its help you can recognize how much place on the disk is occupied by working folders and how much you've saved while archivating the files.

I've used VBScript and WMI to perform file archiving.

I've learned from experience, however, that the "Last Accessed Date" property is unreliable for determing if a file is currently in use or not. Quite a few automated programs modify the that property on files. Additionally, the property may be updated but it doesn't tell us WHO accessed the file. It may just be one person getting bored and looking through the directory tree to kill some time.

I'm using a combination of the "Last Modified Date" and the "Creation Date" to determine if a file should be archived. A file must have a "Last Modified Date" and "Creation Date" older than the date that I choose.

It cannot be only one of the two.

If I use the "Creation Date" alone then if I create a file on 6/12/1998 and modify the file every day afterwards and I archive my files based on a date of 1/1/2000 then my file that was last modifed on 5/30/2007 will be archived.

If I use the "Last Modified Date" alone then I may lose important reference files. If a user downloads a reference spreadsheet from a web site today and places it on the file server then the creation date will have today's date, but it will have the "Last Modified Date" of whenever the web site last modified it.

I've found the best way (for me) to determine if a file or directory is still in use is to enable auditing on the directory that I want to monitor. I can then pull the contents of the security log on the server into a CSV file once a day and monitor the file for users accessing the directory. If someone is accessing it it will not only tell me what date and time they accessed it, but also how often and WHO accessed it and from where.

Anyway, I've got a VBScript if you want to take a look at it. Send me a PM with your e-mail address and I'll e-mail it to you. Currently, I have it configured to delete files determined to be unused. That is because we don't have a secondary file server for archiving and rely strictly on tapes. It does have most of the features that you have listed and can easily be modified to accommodate for the others ones.

If anybody else has suggestions on archiving files from a heavily used file server I would LOVE to hear them. I'm very interested in getting those ideas and possibly putting them to use in the environment that I work with.

Hi Bionicthumb,

Thanks for your responce, looks like you are facing the same problem as i face in my work i.e archiving lots of data. It was good to see that yoy have developed VB script for this. I will be happy to receive it. request to send the same on my email (Sent on PM), If permitted I may change the script to move the files to different location rather than delete. Thanks for sharing and replying my post.