Deleting inaccessible data such as users homedirectories

Users Home Directories are often hardened such that even Domain Administrators have problems migrating them and subsequently deleting them. A way to deal with that is already documented here so this post is really just about the subsequent cleanup of the stubborn source data.

You can sit in Windows Explorer taking ownership and rattling the new permissions down each users tree if you like, but it’s a laborious process when you have 2000 users. It doesn’t always work out 100% successful either.

This is my way of clearing out all users home directories that begin with the characters u5 for example. You can adapt or scale it up it to suit your own requirements easily and save yourself a lot of time and effort.

First, make a list of the directories you want to delete. Whether you have access to them or not is irrelevant at this stage.

dir /ad /b | findstr ^u5 > mylist.txt

dir /ad /b findstr ^U5 >> mylist.txt

Create an empty folder if you dont have one already.

mkdir empty

Now mirror that empty folder over the top of the users in the list, exploiting the operating backup right in robocopy that conveniently bypasses the NTFS security

for /f %F in (mylist.txt) DO robocopy empty %F /MIR /B /TIMFIX

This will leave empty folders behind but the security on them will have been overwritten with that of your empty folder, giving you the permission to delete it.

for /f %F in (mylist.txt) DO rmdir %F

Done.

Note: Use /TIMFIX with /B to correct non-copying of datestamps on files, resulting in 02/01/1980 datestamps on all files copied with /B Backup rights.

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