Log File Cleanup

I needed a tool to clean up log files that exceed a certain age and I remembered a simple executable that I used to have called deleteifolderthan.exe that did just what was required, but when I went looking for it, I couldn't locate it anywhere.

Giving up on that, I decided to write my own script. I needed something that would delete log files over a month old in subdirectories of a parent directory. This is what I came up with:

Const ParentFolder = "E:\Logs"
Const MaxDays = 31
Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set objFolder = objFSO.GetFolder(ParentFolder)
Set colSubFolders = objFolder.SubFolders
For Each objDir in colSubFolders
Set colFiles = objDir.Files
For Each objFile in colFiles
If DateDiff("d",objFile.DateCreated,now) >= MaxDays Then
objFSO.DeleteFile(objFile.Path)
End If
Next
Next

If you wanted to delete old logs in a single folder, you could simplify this to:

Const WatchFolder = "E:\Logs"
Const MaxDays = 31
Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set objDir = objFSO.GetFolder(WatchFolder)
Set colFiles = objDir.Files
For Each objFile in colFiles
If DateDiff("d",objFile.DateCreated,now) >= MaxDays Then
objFSO.DeleteFile(objFile.Path)
End If
Next

Cheers,
Sean

File Recovery

I had to attempt to recover a PST file from a hard disk that had massive numbers of bad blocks. How to copy the file off though? A straight file copy wouldn't work... it just kept giving me CRC errors because the 2.84GB email archive file sat across some of the bad blocks.

I knew if I could get most of the file, I'd probably be able to use the repair tool to recover most of what was in the archive.

JFileRecovery came to the rescue, recovering all but 19MB of the email archive. One of the best parts was that I didn't even need to install anything! It runs as a Java applet straight off the web page.

This one's definitely going in my bookmarks.

Sawmill Report Analyser

I have discovered today that Sawmill is a really cool tool for slicing and dicing data to produce useful analytical reporting information. Well worth a look if you want to produce reports from logged data from Proxies, RADIUS servers, Firewalls, Mail Server logs... you name it.

It has a bunch of preconfigured plug-ins for just about everything, will munch just about any log file you throw at it with quite reasonable performance and is very versatile in its configurability. Pretty cheap too!

I've known about the tool for a while, but never had a reall good play with it until today.

Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with Sawmill.