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EISCIntern's avatar
EISCIntern
Copper Contributor
Aug 17, 2023

Remove bulk "._" (Mac Metadata) Files from SharePoint

Hello all,

 

I am creating a SharePoint site that will serve as a backup to files for my office. The office is wholly situated on Mac OS. These files that I am adding to the SharePoint will rarely need to be accessed by my team and have already been stripped of their illegal characters. Once complete I transferred them to a Windows laptop and used the SharePoint Migration Tool to upload them to the server.

 

Uploading files from a Mac OS or directly through the SharePoint upload button leaves ._ metadata files that I would like to delete en mass. I would prefer to delete these from SharePoint directly and not before I make the upload however I understand if this is the only options.

 

Each backup is around 1Gb with 2000 files (each of which get a metadata file) so an automated or semi-automated method for this would be preferred.

 

I appreciate any and all help offered, let me know if any further information is needed!

 

Thanks.

  • JeremieH's avatar
    JeremieH
    Copper Contributor
    Hi,
    Any luck with that? I have the same issue and tried Power automate but there seems to be some kind of limitation and it doesn't cleanup everything.
    I also can't find a way to do a simple search in sharepoint to list those files. Note: I'm no expert in M365/Sharepoint.
    Regards
    • EISCIntern's avatar
      EISCIntern
      Copper Contributor
      Hi JeremieH,

      There were a couple of methods that I used. The best option I found was to move them all onto a Windows based PC on which I then wrote a custom Python script to find and remove the files. This seemed to be the best approach, I also attempted some other options like the nameMangler paid license with some minor success. In the end we ended up abandoning the project in order to stick with DropBox and only ended up with the priority files shared on SharePoint, this was in part due to other issues (primarily path lengths), and because between the transfer to a Windows PC and the Python script it was going to take way too long. I would suggest looking further into the SharePoint Migration tool, I would believe that there's likely some way to do it through there that I didn't find.

      I hope this helps!
      Thanks.

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