I was previously responsible for supporting a number of file servers that have a large number of very small files archived to them. These files are occasionally referenced from their source systems but I had long suspected that there were a number of orphaned/redundant files on these servers (e.g where we had decommissioned the source system and not cleaned up the archive) and wanted Powershell to help verify this.
I had three wishes:
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To identify which folders on the archive servers were orphans. Our source systems reference these via a DFS path, so its a safe bet that if there are no DFS paths with folder targets pointing to the files on the archive location, they are probably orphans.
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To know when a file was last written/modified in these orphan locations (as a second check that the parent folders were not still being written to directly, e.g outside of a DFS path).
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To know how large the orphaned folders were so that I could brag about how much storage saving I had made.
