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I have a network drive and I am trying to delete a large folder. Man what a pain!

It's been on the "Calculating" phase forever now (it's at 26GB). Isn't there a way to just delete boom! I don't need to know how many files and how big they are!

I'm using Windows 7. I am using "shift" delete to skip the recycle bin.

djsmiley2kStaysInside
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nute
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2 Answers2

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You might be able to use the command prompt. I might be off on some of the details of the procedure, but try this:

  1. Open the Start Menu and in the text box, type cmd.exe and hit Enter (or open the command prompt using your preferred method)
  2. Switch to the network drive by typing Z: (where Z is the letter of the network drive)
  3. Change to the parent directory of the directory you're trying to delete using cd path\to\parent\directory
  4. Delete the directory using rmdir /S giantdir

For example, if you want to delete the directory O:\MG\WTF\BBQ\SOMANYFILES:

C:\Documents And Settings\Me> O:

O:> cd MG\WTF\BBQ

O:\MG\WTF\BBQ> rmdir /S SOMANYFILES

Or now that I think about it, I think you could just do

C:\Documents And Settings\Me> O:

O:> rmdir /S MG\WTF\BBQ\SOMANYFILES

but you would miss out on the chance to see Windows spell out OMGWTFBBQ in terminal font ;-)

By the way, rmdir (or del) does not move things to the Recycle Bin, it just deletes them, so be careful not to delete things you don't really want to.

David Z
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    You don't need the +`.exe`, it will run just fine if you type `cmd` and hit enter. – Corey Jul 02 '10 at 20:57
  • I do `W:\>del backup-043010`, then it says `W:\backup-043010\*, Are you sure (Y/N)? Y`. After a fraction of second it says it's done, but the folder is still here! – nute Jul 02 '10 at 21:08
  • try w:\rmdir backup-04310 – W_Whalley Jul 02 '10 at 21:31
  • @Corey: thanks, I'm more used to Linux so I forget about those details. @nute: OK, apparently `del` doesn't quite act the way it seems like it should, based on the help text. Try `rmdir` instead. I will edit my answer accordingly. – David Z Jul 02 '10 at 21:35
  • is that really faster than through explorer? – nute Jul 03 '10 at 00:11
  • I would think so... for one thing, it doesn't bother to count up the number of files it's deleting, or their total size. At least it's definitely not slower. – David Z Jul 03 '10 at 02:28
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I have similar issue. have 500G folder with tiny files to remove and window delete not work at all. The best way I found is using ftp to connect to NAS and delete the file which I could delete about 100+ files/ sec.

Your NAS may or may not support ftp option. but if it does, you r in luck

Nyan Swun Saung
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