Old Job Back Up

[Nokturnal1]

Hi Guys,

This may seem like a simple question. Or maybe not. But what Im trying to do is back up old files from our Prepress Job Archive, however, I only want to do this up to a certain date. A while ago, we backed up these files onto 2TB Lacie drives. What that did though was change the date of each job folder to the date that they were backed up onto the Lacie drive, rather than preserving the date when the FINAL preflighted file was completed. So now, if I want to clear out jobs that were over 2 years old, I have to expand each sub folder to view the date of the final PDF, rather than just viewing the outer most folders and deleting them.

What I initially tried to do was a 'Find' based on File Extension = PDF and Modified Date = Before May/2009. It brings up all the PDFs, but theres no easy way I can delete the entire enclosing folder without clicking on each one manually and deleting it.

Anyone know of a way this can be done rather than spending hours doing it manually? Im using Leopard on Mac OSX and Ive attached a screenshot to give an idea of what Im talking about. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

[airyk]

well you could put them in folders by year, then you could just delete what is in folder "2008".

[fiatlux]

well you could put them in folders by year, then you could just delete what is in folder "2008".

Much too simple a solution. There must be some expensive proprietary software system that could provide a more complex solution. :-D

FL

[mattbeals]

Yeah, organizing by year is too simple... So I suppose that you could search for folders that have been modified within a specific date range.

I store all my projects in .zip or .rar files as: 20090509_123456_Merrill.zip where the first 8 digits are the date, the underscore, the job number, underscore and then customer name. You could always jumble it around like 123456_merrill_20090509. When you pick it up to work on it again it gets a new number 786322_merrill_20110523 or something like that.

Everyone has something different. As for your particular problem, i think its safe to say it's too late without getting involved in some AppleScript to find: PDF's modified between 2009-05-23 to 2011-05-23 AND its parent folder AND remove selected parent folder and all of its contents.

How the syntax would actually look you'd have to work out.

If you need an AppleScripter let me know. I have a few I can call on for this.

[zoran]

That should be simple enough just using Smart Folders in Snow Leopard.
Hit "Apple key + F" to search folder, Set "Kind" to folder and "Created date" to before 2009 or whatever date you want and once it's done searching, hit "Apple key + A", to select all folders in window and than "Apple key + delete".
That should get rid of all the folders that are older than whatever date you picked.

I hope this helps.

[format]

Hi
Delete the PDFs you have found using find by modify date, the enclosing foldesr will then have a new modifying date you should be able to identify all the modified folders and delete them.

[pcmodem]

This doesn't answer your question but may help this from happening in the future.

The folders should not change their date modified to the date they were copied, they should retain the original date modified. Sounds like the files were copied from a mac volume to a windows volume on a windows computer. If you are copying the files from the mac to a mac drive, you should not have any problems.

[Dottiek]

A few years ago I started *filing* my prepress files by month for our inplant customers. I get frequent requests for " Do you remember/have that file I did last year/3 years ago?" No, I don't recall it, but if you tell me approximately when we printed it, and what it might be called, I might be able to find it- or delete it as in your case.