Remove UTC timestamp from Windows File History Backup for all files in folder recursively, skip over duplicates.

fix_fhb.py

import re
from os.path import join
from os import walk, rename

FOLDER_PATH = join('PATH_TO', 'DIR_NAME')

for path, subdirs, files in walk(FOLDER_PATH):
	for i, name in enumerate(files):
		fixed = re.sub(r' \(.+\)', '', name)
		print('{} / {}'.format(i + 1, len(files)))
		try:
			rename(join(path, name), join(path, fixed))
		except FileExistsError:
			continue

Thank you for this simple but amazing script! Used it to recover files from a File History drive that was erroring through Windows, possibly a corrupted db (Ironic, I know)

One thing I observed was that it skips over files without file extensions. To resolve this I changed the regex line to:

fixed = re.sub(r' \(.+\)', '', name)

Which appeared to work for my files at least, haven't thoroughly tested so results may of course vary!

you're welcome! I had no idea this script would ever be used by anyone but me 😂😂. I'll update the gist, thanks for the fix!

I've been putting off trying to write something like this myself. Then I found this!

Thank you!