Prior post on this story: https://devrant.com/rants/1635258/...

Apparently my dad decided to adopt the Windows file system hierarchy for his business.

He has managed to store his video, picture, and music folder INSIDE the DOCUMENTS folder. And there are seperate video, picture, and music folders outside of this folder. The business information is in all of these folders adding up to about 600GB of data in 10 different folders and 4 trees. Nothing has been deleted since 2010. WHAT IN THE EVER LOVING CHRIST ON A FUCKING POGO-STICK IS THIS ABOMINATION. I AM GOING TO JUMP OFF A CLIFF NAKED AND ON FIRE BEFORE I TRY TO SORT THIS SHIT.

As funny as it may be you could try to make a processor script that would take all the files and first flatten the hierarchy to the file names and hit up all references, after having that list you could check the last changed status on the files and determine which of them is the most recent modified version and delete the others, also make sure to just delete not permanent delete so you have a chance of restoring different versions of the files, and that would be a first step, on the other-hand you can also add content checks regardless of the file type and see that there are actual changes, with that kind of thing you could swiftly restructure the folders in the adequate structure and organize the files, also you could use mime types to determine which files should go where and generate the folder struct when needed.

No task is hard if you can automate, if you want help with it just let me know :)

@Ratsuky It would need to be a bash script. I'm willing to try it after spending 4 hours trying to clean this.

give me a minute to start up my vagrant because i'm currently forced on a windows machine and i'll whip something up that can iterate the path and analyze the files

@starrynights89

Could you by any chance get php up on that machine, just in case, i think i could get it done faster in php rather than bash right now

@starrynights89 bash shouldn't be required. I did something very similar for my partner's Windows desktop using python.

Why does your dad use visual studio? Is he a dev?

At least you've got the best file explorer on the planet.

@Ratsuky Sure I can run it from php

@bezorp I should do some research into that. My python is rusty but I could whip something up quickly with it.

@MrCSharp No that was when I was helping him benchmark his PC. If it can run Visual Studio without crashing it's a good sign. :P

@starrynights89 wouldn't android studio give more accurate results? 😂😂

@starrynights89 sorry for ghosting yesterday, i had some errands to run after a long night nd a stupid day at work and when i finally got home and all was well i fell flat on my face without the capacity to think....if you're still in need of the script and haven't had the time to completely sort it out i can still help.

@Ratsuky Nah it's all good man. I wrote a very basic python program to get things cleaned up. Ended up teaching my parents a lot about cloud storage.