Expire Files In A Folder: Delete Files After x Days

We used a combination of a powershell script and a policy. The policy specifies that the user must create a folder inside the Drop_Zone share and then copy whatever files they want into that folder. When the folder gets to be 7 days old (using CreationTime) the powershell script will delete it.

I also added some logging to the powershell script so we could verify it's operation and turned on shadow copies just to save the completely inept from themselves.

Here is the script without all the logging stuff.

$location = Get-ChildItem \\foo.bar\Drop_Zone
$date = Get-Date
foreach ($item in $location) {
  # Check to see if this is the readme folder
  if($item.PsIsContainer -and $item.Name -ne '_ReadMe') {
    $itemAge = ((Get-Date) - $item.CreationTime).Days
    if($itemAge -gt 7) {
      Remove-Item $item.FullName -recurse -force
    }
  }
  else {
  # must be a file
  # you can check age and delete based on that or just delete regardless
  # because they didn't follow the policy
  }
}

If you can assume NTFS you could write a key (Guid) into an alternate stream of the file. Plus the date, so you could basically store the database in the files.

More information can be found at

http://blogs.technet.com/b/askcore/archive/2013/03/24/alternate-data-streams-in-ntfs.aspx

Basically you can store additional content in a separate stream that is coded by a special name.

You could use IO.FileSystemWatcher, which allows you to "watch" a folder for new files created. Here are the pieces you'd need to make this work.

These variables configure the path to watch and a filter to fine-tune which files to track:

$watchFolderPath = $env:USERPROFILE
$watchFolderFilter = "*.*"

This sets up the parameters for the folder to watch and the actions to perform when the event occurs. Basically this resets the LastWriteTime on each file as it's written:

$watcher = New-Object IO.FileSystemWatcher $watchFolderPath, $watchFolderFilter -Property @{
    IncludeSubdirectories = $true
    NotifyFilter = [IO.NotifyFilters]'FileName, LastWrite'
    }
$onCreated = Register-ObjectEvent $watcher Created -SourceIdentifier FileCreated -Action {
    $FileName = $Event.SourceEventArgs.FullPath
    $file = Get-Item $FileName
    $file.LastWriteTime = Get-Date
    }

The event can be unregistered if needed using this:

Unregister-Event -SourceIdentifier FileCreated

Finally, you can run this once a day in order to clean up the old files:

Get-ChildItem $watchFolderPath -Recurse | Where-Object {((Get-Date)-$_.LastWriteTime).TotalDays -gt 6} | Remove-Item

That should be everything you need...

Expire Files In A Folder: Delete Files After x Days

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