Identifying and Removing Orphans Stubs from File Server

[karmakoma_029]

We have a file server that previously was configured with Enterprise Vault for archiving.

The file archiving has since been decommissioned and we have a new instance of EV only used for mail archiving.

There are a number of orphan stubs still on the file server and I am trying to find a way to locate and delete them. 

Does anyone have any suggestions? FSAUtility with the -o switch doesn't work as this file server is not configured on the new instance of Enterprise Vault.

[MichelZ]

Check a few files first using PowerShell:

Get-ChildItem D:\temp -Recurse -Attributes Offline

If you think all of them are really old EV shortcuts, you can pipe it to Remove-Item:

Get-ChildItem D:\temp -Recurse -Attributes Offline | Remove-Item -Force

[ChrisLangevin]

Michel,

This is part of a solution, but there's one more step you need. FSA Placeholders do have the Offline attribute, but so might other types of files that use Windows' Offline Files feature. A more precise test would look for both the Offline and ReparsePoint attributes, which must both be present on a proper FSA Placeholder file.

Get-ChildItem D:\temp -Recurse -Attributes Offline, ReparsePoint

(Strictly speaking, it isn't impossible that some other application could also make use of offline files with a reparse point; in that case you would also need to inspect the actual reparse point data on each file and look for the Enterprise Vault URL. However, that adds a great amount of complexity for such an exceedingly unlikely scenario, and so just checking for the Offline and ReparsePoint attributes should be fine in 99.99% of cases.)

--Chris