Delete many tiny files fast?  

Hi there, what is a recommended way to delete many small files... fast?

And by many small files, I'm talking about in excess of 1 million files in one session.

So what I'm doing is extracting geocities archives, compressing images and rezipping them. In one archive, I'm dealing with way more than 3.2M files measuring over 70GB. Over 100K files is enough to overwhelm the recycle bin usually to a point where it becomes laggy.

Hello mate,

I suppose you could see if using the "Permanently delete" context menu added by the tutorial below may work for this. It will permanently delete the selected files without going to the Recycle Bin first.

Add Permanently Delete to Context Menu in Windows 10

Thanks brink I've added that & I'll give it a shot.

@vgchat: Another option from the command line:

Code:

del /F/Q *.* > nul

/F = forces deletion of read-only files
/Q = quiet mode (no prompting)
> NUL = disable output to the screen

The > NUL option will save you a lot of time with all those files you are deleting.

Alright thanks for that, I'll definitely be using that.

vgchat said:

Alright thanks for that, I'll definitely be using that.

I'd be interested to see how well it worked. Let us know the outcome.

More than likely I'll be mostly using brinks method due to being able to use it with a context menu.

I did see a tut on how to add yours to a context menu but I never saw a tut on it that included a bat to automate it.
Otherwise, dropping it in a folder would delete stuff I'm not yet ready to delete.

vgchat said:

More than likely I'll be mostly using brinks method due to being able to use it with a context menu.

I did see a tut on how to add yours to a context menu but I never saw a tut on it that included a bat to automate it.
Otherwise, dropping it in a folder would delete stuff I'm not yet ready to delete.

Maybe this can help?

Code:

@ECHO OFF
ECHO Delete Folder: %CD%?
PAUSE
SET FOLDER=%CD%
CD /
DEL /F/Q/S "%FOLDER%" > NUL
RMDIR /Q/S "%FOLDER%"
EXIT

How to delete large folders in Windows super fast - gHacks Tech News

I'm going to mark the above as solved but I have another query now...

Those files I was talking about, do you think it would be safe to move them onto a nvme?

They will need to be:
Unzipped
Scanned with an Malwarebytes (which will be real-time scanning things too)
Metadata deleted from any found png's & jpeg files from a tool called JPEG & PNG Stripper (which will look at every file trying to find these types.)
Have Jpegmini run over folders & process all jpegs it can find
And finally be zipped back up

I'll be doing this with a working set of data that is over 900GB unzipped and I have no idea how many files there will be but a few million of them compose of a 70GB sample (more than 3M of them). Would this be considered safe to do on a nvme or would it wear the nvme down too much? I know that a nvme can do the job fast but I also don't want to wear the thing down with excessive usage or by doing something that's not recommended.

Interesting work!

Unfortunately I don't know enough about how NVMe's work. If it's anything like a traditional SSD, then you might be OK.....I remember the early days of everyone worrying about SSD wearing quickly with lots of read-write, but it turned out to be a red herring.

Perhaps if you post the make and model of the NVMe, someone more knowledgeable will reply.

Did you consider using some cheaper traditional hard disks in a RAID0 for this work at all?