well I had issues there as it finds and stores complete paths including spaces in the file path. Still barely qualifies as script but darn sure does the job for FINDing them. I gwet so much help from everyone maybe this is will be of some use to some other poor sucker like me who hired on to work with (FOR!!) a bunch of techno-nit-wits. I had put it on another thread.Д«ut repeated here just in case. Sorry Tomos: Thought i had put it with this question. If someone knows the correct 'tag' to use instead of file length, i could just plug it into other script I have and get the same list of EFS files instead of Zero Length files. This seems to be an inherited permission though I have not tried so hard to find out, I just want to get this over with. So the users unwittingly makes their own files unreadable. Early EFS setups can easily be transferred forward onto new drives without their keys and apparently all it takes is to put a regular file into an EFS folder and the flag gets set for the file. On several sites many SYS admins point out that this is a critical 'first thing to do' when working with old data servers becasue of this. That encryption flag is apparently not so easy to locate or make notes of the path to the file. I next needed a way to search for Only EFS files regardless of size and that turned out to be a little harder.ДЄpparently, the fact they are EFS makes them somewhat invisible to many search utilities. Many of these files turn out to be inside whole EFS folders. It did not find all the EFS files or even close. The script did a great job and even located a ton of trash I can remove but. My reasoning was that most of these EFS files had no data because of their lack of keys when copied. And surprise ! it works and just one line too. If you take a look at my other post about this you can see a pretty nifty script I came up with to look for and make a list of all zero length files on the entire hard-drive. They cannot be overwritten either so I cannot go back. The old server 2008 R2 (and maybe even server 2003) had cases where the files ended up with EFS encryption but when the drives were pulled no one bothered to save the keys.Д«ecause of the fact that I have all these drives from many years to work with I found that eventually I can find the same file somewhere with no EFS.Д«ut: In any case where an encrypted file (even if it is one with a zero file length) syncs to the same location of files that are NOT zero length, the EFS files always get kept instead regardless of date or size. Some of these files are copied direct from old server drives. Probably not an off the shelf issues for sure. Then maybe I can just burn them after use I can't wait for the 3d-printable hard-drives to comes out. Those 3 years or older though get 'shredded' (hard to believe you have to shred a harddrivethese days.

If it is one of the newer drives I will keep it in rotation. I can do a lowlevel format and check for any glitches. If it does as it szhould D: shold be empty. I cn' t see any instance (other than an immovable file) where it could be left over on the drive D. I don't trust 5 year old hard-drives all that much.ДЄlmost forgot, do either 'clean up' the original? The reason for the cleanup is so there is no doubt that something was done with everything. With hard-drives cheaper than backup tapes used to be this is just how they have been doing it to provide failsafe redundancy but after 5 years i need to get this all onto a single new master copy. I have never used either program so will try both. If it works, i have maybe 30 backup drives to merge into a single drive with the most relevant data so i will know for sure after the first run and can't hurt anyway.

Tomos, yours as displayed would probably work and i working with drive copies for the first run.

Thanks to you both for such quick answers.

Syncovery before script as admin