Is there a way to QUICKLY delete multiple records?

[1FilemakerMan]

  Hello again everyone!  I have a hopefully quick and easy question.  Our database has a lot of older records that need to be deleted.   When we did a search for these records, and told the system to delete all of them, it seems to take FOREVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  These 25,281 records would take well over two, or three hours at that rate it is going, and that is only one month of records 😞 .      We are simply searching for them, and then selecting, "delete found records".  I have tried creating a query to delete all shown records, and had the same results.  Is there any quick way to delete a lot of records?    

THey are NOT associated with any other table in the database either.

And here is the script I wrote for this.
THANKS!!

 

 

[bcooney]

truncate table. be very careful.

[1FilemakerMan]

We are only wanting to delete certain records.  Mainly ones that are older than two years.

[Steve Martino]

When you delete records from one table are you also deleting any child/grandchild records?

Your profile doesn't mention version, operating system, server etc., nor do you mention stand alone computer, multiple users, etc.

I do a weekly import/find/sort delete-usually in the 60K range, takes about 25 seconds. 

[1FilemakerMan]

The table has no child/grandchild records.   The operating system is Mojave, the version on the Macs is Filemaker 15, on the server it is FM 13.    I copied the database to my Mac and tried to delete these files also, and that took the same amount of time.

[mr_vodka]

Have you tried deleting on the server?  Also it may make more sense in your case to save a clone and import the data you will use going forward rather than delete if there are far more records to delete than save.