![]() Tap on the Windows-key, type cmd.exe and select the result to load the command prompt.Here’s the step-by-step process to delete large folders using CMD: The two commands that users require are Del, for deleting files, and Rmdir, for removing directories. Matt suggested adding the commands to the Explorer context menu so that users could run them in Explorer directly. The downside to this is that it requires the use of the command line. Matt Pilz, who wrote about this back in 2015 saw a reduction from 11 minutes to 29 seconds, which made the command line operation more than 20 times faster than the Explorer option. Using CMD in Windows XP/7/10 to delete huge folders You may notice that the operation needs just a fraction of the time that the same operation requires when you run it in Explorer. If you run delete commands from the command line instead, you will notice that the operation completes a lot faster. Delete Large Folders in Windows Quickly Using CMD It may take ten or twenty minutes, or even longer, to delete a large folder (of size greater than 10 GB, for instance) from your hard disk using Explorer on Windows devices. Then when the actual deleting takes place, Windows analyzes the process and posts updates to the file operation window. Then comes the deletion part, even if you choose to delete the folders permanently (force delete). This includes running calculations first, which, in itself may take a very long time to complete. The problem is that Windows prepares to delete first. When I need to delete them again, it takes a long time if I run the delete operation in Windows Explorer. I keep backup folders of gHacks locally on a platter-based drive, and these folders come close to 30 Gigabytes in size with more than 140,000 files and 350 folders. When you delete huge folders in Windows, you will notice that the process takes quite a bit of time to complete. Why Does Windows Take Time to Delete Large Folders? If you are in a hurry, jump to the next section for the solution. Please see Figure 4 below for a comparison of how Windows Explorer and the Command Line Interface (CLI) display the same set of files.But before I go through the superfast way to delete large folders, here’s the reason why it takes so much time. Consistency within the Operating System:Įven though Windows Explorer takes advantage of the StrCmpLogicalW API and sorts files and folders with names containing numerals in a logical manner, other areas of the operating system (such as the command line interface) still use the traditional sort method, causing inconsistencies in the way files are displayed in different parts of the same operating system. Had Windows sorted the files without any special handling, the attorney or litigation support team would have noticed the incorrect sort order and compensated for it by correctly padding the file names or applying a custom sort order. Consequently, files would be processed and numbered in a different order than what the attorney had anticipated. However, computer forensics and e-discovery tools do not implement Microsoft’s sort algorithm, and treat the file and folder names as strings while sorting. Looking at the files in Windows Explorer, he would naturally assume that the files would be processed in the order as he sees them on his computer. Imagine a lawyer organizing exhibits to be processed to TIFF, endorsed and produced. ![]() ![]() Compatibility with e-Discovery and Computer Forensics Software: ![]() While this seems logical and may be helpful to most people, we believe that it brings new issues, especially in the legal industry. Figure 3 – Windows Numerical Sort in Windows XP Issues Associated with Windows Numerical Sort ![]()
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