Maximum Directory Entries

[Lawrence Czlapinski]

Rob, we have a requirement for keeping 2 months worth of some files. We use a cleanup batch job which is kicked off by DAILY_JOBS to manage the movement of those files. The prior days files are renamed to a date subdirectories (ex: [.2004-08-17]). An offset on the day to be moved can be used. Then the files are moved to an archive disk also with a date subdirectory. The original files are deleted from the original directories. We then delete the date subdirectories after the amount of days to keep. The date subdirectories contents and directory older than the retention period for that data type are then deleted. If you have enough space on the same disk you may not need to move your files to a 2nd disk. Once the files are renamed to another directory the original directory won't be getting locks. The maximum size of your directory is then related to the maximum number of files generated in a day. An advantage of this method is that file deletion time is not important for us. Since file deletions are done in a different directory by a low priority (priority 3) batch task, the batch task could take up to 24 hours or longer to complete if it needed to.