Improve the performance for enumerating files and folders using .NET

Question

I have a base directory that contains several thousand folders. Inside of these folders there can be between 1 and 20 subfolders that contains between 1 and 10 files. I\'d

Answer 1

I realize this is very late to the party but if someone else is looking for this then you can speed things up by orders of magnitude by directly parsing the the MFT or FAT of the file system, this requires admin privileges as I think it will return all files regardless of security but can probably take your 30 mins down to 30 seconds for the enumeration stage at least.

A library for NTFS is here https://github.com/LordMike/NtfsLib there is also https://discutils.codeplex.com/ which I haven't personally used.

I would only use these methods for initial discovery of files over x days old and then verify them individual before deleting, it might be overkill but I'm cautious like that.