Deleting unused files from the Sites directory

[jonsurf]

Hi there

Over the years I've accumulated lots of files (images, html, etc) in the Sites directory that are no longer used on the website.

Is there an easy way to check the content in Actinic against the files in the Sites directory to establish the files that are redundant? Or even an automated way of deleting the files from within Actinic?

Thanks

Jon

[fergusw]

Not a 100%, sure fire way Jon I'm afraid, but if you have performed a website refresh of late then all* the files that Actinic requires should have a modified date equivalent to at least the time you performed the refresh.
This should* mean that anything with an older date is not used by Actinic and therefore could be removed/backed up.

*note: some non-Actinic files could still be referenced/linked from Actinic pages (e.g. PDF's) that you would need to keep/reupload.

[Duncan Rounding]

If you're referring to the Site1 directory or other local site folders then there is no simple way of doing this.

[jonsurf]

Thanks Fergus, that sounds like a good idea. So, if I were to perform a website refresh today, would Actinic change all of the modified dates of the files in the Site1 folder that it uses to today's date?

[NormanRouxel]

If you open ActinicCatalog.mdb in Access, there's a table "FileList" that lists everything that gets uploaded.

Entries in the Path table that contain %7bSITE% and don't contain %5c will be directly in your Site folder. Should be easy to make a query that thus lists only the Site folder files.

N.B. Take care deleting things! Many files in the Site folder are used internally by Actinic and never get uploaded. E.g. ShoppingCart.pl is required but not uploaded. It is processed by Actinic to generate ca000001.pl which is the live website file.

[leehack]

I think there is an easy way actually, if you snapshot your site it automatically includes everything being used on the site, if you then backup your site folder (just in case) and then remove the items from within your image folders so they are empty, once you import back in the latest snapshot, it will bring in with it all resources used and you will then have a clean installation with only items being used. All the unused items will sit in your backup of site1. You could go one step further by doing the above and instead uninstalling actinic and then reinstalling and then reimporting the snapshot.

[jonsurf]

Thanks Norman, that gives me exactly what I need! I'll probably just be looking at deleting images and html files and won't risk deleting any scripts!

[jonsurf]

Thanks Lee, that sound like a great idea too. I'll give it a try...