orphaned backup files

[sandiegophil]

backups are daily for archive attribs / end of week full backup / end of month full backup

[Jack_O'neill]

Sort by name will work but who wants the tedium of going through the list of bak files to determine which are which? If that is a method you want to try then pick a single name followed by n underscore and number such as Mockup_1 or Temp_1 or Preliminary_1. The next person to come along and create a temporary drawing just indexes the number. Finding all the Temp_*.bak files will be a lot easier. Do it using a batch file. Hey Jack...you remember .bat files right?

 

Sure I do...didn't realize he had 300,000 of them to do. Might be a good project for that intern nobody likes though:lol:

[Jack_O'neill]

There's a visual basic macro in that link I posted that you can use to speed it up too. You may not be able to do all however many thousand you have all at once, but you should be able to go through a large quantity of them at a time and it will even do it for you without moving the file names. It will look at different worksheets to compare them

[sandiegophil]

thank you all very much. I have a great start at this now!!

 

Best regards,

Phil

[ReMark]

Maybe some sort of protocol needs to be written and disseminated to your CAD people regarding the creation of these temporary files whereby they notify someone of the names they used? You might even want to try and stamp out this bad habit thus reducing the number of orphaned bak files on your server. Who is the CAD Manager?

[sandiegophil]

um..... me

[Jack_O'neill]

Maybe some sort of protocol needs to be written and disseminated to your CAD people regarding the creation of these temporary files whereby they notify someone of the names they used? You might even want to try and stamp out this bad habit thus reducing the number of orphaned bak files on your server. Who is the CAD Manager?

 

Or if you can't get them to break that habit, give each person his own limited space folder for doing this. When it gets full, he has to delete it. That and a big club might solve your problem.

[ReMark]

um..... me

 

Hey guys. What's the punishment around here for neglecting to enforce good CAD standards and practices? Anyone remember? LOL

 

Big oops there.

[SLW210]

If the DWG are indeed backed up on the server, I see no need for ANY .BAK files. I would just search each directory for .BAK, select all and delete.

 

If you will search "Remove .BAK" on Autodesk.com, Google etc. you will find plenty of info and even some programs.

[sandiegophil]

SLW210

 

Thanks for the input. That seems to be what I'm leaning towards with our backups being reliable...........

[rkent]

After the nightly backup simply delete them all each night.

 

Or stop creating .bak files altogether, going on 13 years without the .bak "safety net" and haven't regretted it once.

[SLW210]

Or if you can't get them to break that habit' date=' give each person his own limited space folder for doing this. When it gets full, he has to delete it. That and a big club might solve your problem.[/quote']

 

I did find out that some IT/Cad Managers have directed .BAK files to remain on the personal drives of the creator, thus not placing them on the server. Just run the search I directed ABOVE^^ and you will see plenty of results.

 

I either do all of my work on my on hard drive or my personal network folder and only move my DWGs to the network.

[Jack_O'neill]

After the nightly backup simply delete them all each night.

 

Or stop creating .bak files altogether, going on 13 years without the .bak "safety net" and haven't regretted it once.

 

Especially since you do a daily back up anyway, turn the bak's off and autosave on. Unless somebody gets delete happy you couldn't lose more than what was done since the last autosave.