Deleting large numbers of files/folders (OS 6.6.0)

Hello,

I have had an incremental replicate job running daily for around a year and am now looking to delete all those files

There are a lot of small folders and files on the source (several hundred thousand).

When I tried to simply delete the whole top level folder though the web interface it spent all day yesterday never even managing to calculate the estimated time. When I looked today there is no evidence that any operation is even running any more so I would guess it ran out of resources and failed

Whats is the way to delete a huge file structure like this reliably (and preferably quickly?)

Would deleting the actual share be more reliable or would this essentially be the same?

Some additional info:

- The data is all in a single share which contains nothing else

Grateful for any pointers people can give.

Peter