Looking for some help on this. Somewhat of an outside-the-box thinking question. We run a lot of Thinapps for many different applications. We keep the sandboxes for those applications on a users home drive that gets mapped when they login. After a couple of years of use and more use going foward, i've found that the number of sandbox folders keeps growing because of upgrades and changes within the application, so we have to repackage and republish thus multiple sandboxes are created for the same application.
Does anyone have a system or method to do a clean up of those folders? Or have any ideas? Even if it's as basic as running a script against our SAN to find folders that haven't been used, but I don't know how you would differentiate between old sandboxes and ones you currently use. Any thoughts and/or ideas are appreciated.
We have the same issues on several of our customers locations.
What we do is that we have lists of active applications, as well as 'old' applications. The sandboxes get renamed for every new release of a virtualised application (we don't re-use existing sandboxes as for example updated isolation modes would not be applied). This makes that the number of unused sandboxes is in general larger than the number of active ones.
In our case we advise our customers to place sandboxes on some share using a general naming policy (in general by setting the sandbox redirect environment variable). The sandboxes are thus stored in something like \\server\share$\% username %\sandboxes\(sandboxname).
Now we have 2 simple scripts:
The first one loops through the folderstructure that matches a given naming policy. This dumps sandboxname, size and last access date
This can be imported i excel, access or whatever 'inteligent' tool to determine the extreme sandboxes (old (aka: unused apps), large (invalid sandbox policy applied), average size, total size/sandboxname, ...)
The second script is cleaning up sandboxes, matching sandboxes in the given location agains a list of sandboxnames to be cleaned. This is only used to delete ALL sandboxes for a given application (sandbox identifier). Individual sandboxes are removed only manual (for example when extreme in size due to updating the virtualised app, which should never be done by a user)
These scripts do need adaption for every location, but are simple to create yourselves. I have done similar actions in VBscript as well as Powershell and the basis should operational within a few hours for a handy scripter.
Kind regards,
Michael Baars - Comprehensive ICT Solutions (NL)
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Thank you for the ideas.
