Jonathan J's questions

I DO NOT want to "delete files older than X days." If I wanted to do this, I'd just pick one of the thousands of scripts out there that have already been written for that purpose, and I wouldn't bother asking such a trivial question on ServerFault.

I DO want to delete all but the most recent N files in a particular folder.

Background: a remote system is configured to dump a periodic archive files to a share on a Windows server. These files have a naming convention of YYYYMMDD-hhmm.ext. Should the archive process fail, I don't want the purge script to delete the files just because they are older than so-many-days. There is no way to configure the remote system to purge the files as part of the archive process.

So for example, when the script runs there may be 10 files, there may be 7 files, there may be 5 files in the folder. I need to always keep at least the most recent 5, regardless of how old they are.

Can this be done with PowerShell?

EDIT: it would be desirable to ignore files or folders not matching the naming convention. Other files and folders shouldn't be deleted, nor should they confuse the script (resulting in the retention of fewer than 5 archive files).

On a Windows Small Business Server 2011, I have redirected the shadow copies for all volumes to a single, dedicated volume. This volume contains no other data; the only folder is System Volume Information.

Is it necessary to back up this folder for disaster recovery purposes?

I understand that the System State backup as well as Exchange and other services are backed up using VSS and that VSS writes to the System Volume Information folder, but it's not clear to me if that data is also written to the backup media separately as part of the VSS operation (that is, the SVI is used as a staging area) or if the SVI folder must be backed up after the VSS backup using simple file-based backup techniques.