Powershell: Delete a Folder of a Particular Age

I created this script to delete a folder which is older than two days. I needed this for a simple backup solution. I have a Powershell script that will backup a VM which runs in VMware Workstation. This script runs everyday and creates a folder with a date stamp. After a couple weeks there where a lot of copies of the particular VM and the free space of the backup hard disk became very low.

This script will remove all folders in the D:\vmbackup folder which are older then 2 days.

$Now = Get-Date
$Days = "2"
$TargetFolder = "D:\vmbackup"
$LastWrite = $Now.AddDays(-$Days)

$Folders = get-childitem -path $TargetFolder | 
Where {$_.psIsContainer -eq $true} | 
Where {$_.LastWriteTime -le "$LastWrite"} 

    foreach ($Folder in $Folders)
    {
    write-host "Deleting $Folder" -foregroundcolor "Red"
    Remove-Item $Folder -recurse -Confirm:$false
    }

Published by afokkema

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3 thoughts on “Powershell: Delete a Folder of a Particular Age”

Marc says:

August 26, 2009 at 08:10

Don’t know why it did not work with my environment, I got the error cannot find path c:\folder (where folder is a subfolder of $targetfolder).
I changed your script to this:

$folder = $targetfolder + “\” + $folder
write-host “Deleting $Folder” -foregroundcolor “Red”
Remove-Item $Folder -recurse -Confirm:$false

and now it worked…

thx

Reply
Greg says:

November 23, 2011 at 23:35

Hey – tried using this code and the additional comment code but had various problems. I’ve resolved them and you can see the final code here on the MS Powershell forums: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-ca/winserverpowershell/thread/ca1d2077-42d1-4110-8fc1-78d21affb7a5

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Jeroen Budding says:

August 29, 2017 at 08:54

Following script needs to be changed.
I changed the Remove-Item so it goes to the correct directory.

$Now = Get-Date
$Days = “30”
$TargetFolder = “D:\Report”
$LastWrite = $Now.AddDays(-$Days)

$Folders = get-childitem -path $TargetFolder |
Where {$_.psIsContainer -eq $true} |
Where {$_.LastWriteTime -le “$LastWrite”}

foreach ($Folder in $Folders)
{
write-host “Deleting $Folder” -foregroundcolor “Red”
Remove-Item $TargetFolder\$Folder -recurse -Confirm:$false
}

Reply