Delete Files Older Than …

I have a bunch of drives on which I backup our servers (I rotate them) and I was running out of space on them because of the old backup files. So I decided to delete every file that was created more than a 1 month(31 days) ago, as it’s specified in the backup procedure.

Here is the powershell one liner:

Dir ‘d:\testxxx’ | Where-Object { $_ -is [System.IO.FileInfo] } | Where-Object {$_.CreationTime -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-31)} | Remove-Item –Force

and you can add the –Recurse switch to find all files in the subfolders of the path like this:

Dir ‘d:\testxxx’  -Recurse | Where-Object { $_ -is [System.IO.FileInfo] } | Where-Object {$_.CreationTime -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-31)} | Remove-Item –Force

You’ll want to replace d:\testxxx with the name of your folder or drive. You set how old would be the remaining files by changing the number or method in the (Get-Date).AddDays(-31) section .

For example if you want that the files that you keep would be of at most two months old you would need to change the powershell command like this:

Dir ‘d:\testxxx’ | Where-Object { $_ -is [System.IO.FileInfo] } | Where-Object {$_.CreationTime -lt (Get-Date).AddMonths(-2)} | Remove-Item –Force

Of course you have o bunch of methods available:

AddDays
AddHours
AddMilliseconds
AddMinutes
AddMonths
AddSeconds
AddTicks
AddYears

And if you need to keep the older files you simply change the Where-Object {$_.CreationTime -lt (Get-Date).AddMonths(-2)

like this:

Where-Object {$_.CreationTime -gt (Get-Date).AddMonths(-2)

But be very carefull with this command and test it first on a test folder and only after you’re certain of the result use it because it will delete a lot of files in no time.

For testing you’ll need to set the creation time of some files at your convenience so  that’s how you’ll do it.

For a single file:

$a=Get-ChildItem d:\testxxx\file1.txt

$a.CreationTime=(Get-Date).AddMonths(-3)

For multiple files with name pattern filexxx.txt

foreach($x in Get-ChildItem d:\testxxx\file*.txt)

{

$x.CreationTime=(Get-Date).AddMonths(-3)

}