Litigation Server Cleanup Tool

In my information management job at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada there was an old server full of files nobody needed. Going through them one at a time would have taken forever, and anything deleted had to follow an approved process and be written down.

It started as a PowerShell script. I rebuilt it in Python as a proper desktop app: point it at a folder, it sorts the files into Delete or Verify, and anything marked Verify needs a person’s initials before it goes.

Every removal is logged to an Excel sheet with the file’s name, location, type, size, date and who checked it. I packaged it as a normal Windows program, wrote a guide and training material, and demoed it to supervisors and the people who’d be using it.

It worked on my machine and then didn’t on the server. There was no Recycle Bin to fall back on, and everyone had the shared drive mapped to a different letter. I had to build for how other people’s computers were set up, not how mine was.

Instead of deleting files outright, the tool moves them to a separate folder that works as its own recycle bin. If something was removed by mistake, it can be put back.

The approved cleanup took off about 1.7 TB in the first pass and roughly 2.2 TB in total after more review. I left behind guides for using it, teaching it, and eventually retiring it.