Welcome HomeDir (Sanitarium)

Welcome to where time stands still.
No one leaves and no one will.


We have a case of allowing the inmates to run the asylum at our organization. For years we've provided unlimited storage space for office file shares and home directories. We've imposed some restrictions mind you. We don't let the inmates keep knives, guns, or narcotics but we're fine with allowing them to pretty much dictate all the other rules.

So here we are, years down the road, millions (literally) of files and thousands of folders. We have 4% of our users consuming 90% of HomeDir storage, backups that take days, not enough tapes to keep more than 90 days of backups...did I mention if seems like an asylum some days?

On a lighter note, we're ready to implement an archival utility to free up some storage space but we have some decisions to make and policies to implement in our organization:
1) Policy: Files with lastAccessTime older than 6yrs should be deleted.
1a) Dilemma: Management wants us to notify users whenever we're about to delete files so they can have the option to recover, recycle, or save a copy to DVD. Unfortunately, we have 500K+ files in this category. Many of these files exist in office shares that potentially have hundreds of valid owners.

Obviously PowerShell has come in handy with querying to analyze this situation. I've created reports with path, owner, size, lastAccessTime for each file meeting this condition. (Shameless PowerShell plug) As often is the case, software we've purchased to handle some process can't turn out information that I can produce sometimes with a one-line PowerShell script.

My current plan/proposal to management:
Code Name: Straight-Jacket
-Strictly enforce our Policy of 6yrs
-Notify users of policy
-Provide users with means to create their own DVD copies of files
-Setup temporary recycle bin (storage) for deleted files for 3-6mo period.

Now to convince management that trying to notify users of individual file deletion is putting all the responsibility on us and not on the folks who have already have a vested interest in managing files. Wish me luck!
(Metallica - Welcome Home (sanitarium))