Re: [IMail Forum] WAY OT: Archiving software

[Matt]

The time wasted or money spent on making this work would seem like it might be better spent on more hard drives and some scripting.  A 200 GB drive runs only about $130 these days, and I think the scripting could be done in 1 to 2 hours max. My recommendation would be to write a script that searches the directory tree for any file that has not been modified within X number of days, and then copy that file over (including the directory settings) to the archive drive.  Cleaning up empty directories could also be automated so inactive customers will no longer be present on the active drive.  This could be done in less than 50 lines of well commented code.  Run the script once a week and you've got an archival system. I would also mirror the archive drives just to be safe.  You can configure Windows to do file compression on them which will save you space and not take up hardly any processing since the old files will be rarely if ever used. Since the script would base things on last modified dates, copying a file over from the archive drive to the active drive will cause the time stamp to be reset. If you tried to do this with burning things to DVD's, keep in mind the failure rates of burning them, the limited lifespan of discs, and the disorganization created by having files all over the place.  It's hard to get customers to even swap out backup tapes let alone manage a process like this, so I recommend just simply automating the whole thing with the hard drive setup that I described. Matt John Tolmachoff (Lists) wrote: But this is for a hard drive partition which a hundred or so top level folders and a total of like around 5000 folders of various levels and over 150,000 files in the various folders. John Tolmachoff Engineer/Consultant/Owner eServices For You -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:IMail_Forum- [EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Duane Hill Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2005 2:51 PM To: IMail_Forum@list.ipswitch.com Subject: Re: [IMail Forum] WAY OT: Archiving software Kind of off topic response: I do mention e-mail :-) With some Perl experience this could be done relatively easy. Perl has modules to traverse directory structures and search for files. This coupled with a command line packing tool like WinRAR, single archives could be readied to burn. I have all of our logs on all of our e-mail servers packed up and transferred to a server to burn every day at a specific time. I have e-mail server logs dating back as far as 1999 archived. On Wednesday, February 2, 2005 at 10:22:11 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] confabulated: This has nothing to do with e-mail. Replies can be sent off list. I have a client that has about 200 gigs of files for clients. They are a printing shop and need to retain the files that they worked on or created as some customers may only come in once every couple of years. Problem is that takes up a lot of hard drive space. I have recommended that they burn old files onto CD or DVD, but they can not just take this folder or that folder as there is mostly a mix of new and old. Does any one know of software that can scan for old files, burn those onto CD or DVD keeping the folder structure so they can find it, and then produce an index of where the files are? John Tolmachoff Engineer/Consultant/Owner eServices For You ----- Duane Hill Sr E-Mail Administrator http://www.yournetplus.com To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/ To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/ -- ===================================================== MailPure custom filters for Declude JunkMail Pro. http://www.mailpure.com/software/ =====================================================