Winsxs on W2008 - Can I reduce size or move it?

[MarHar]

I have a VPS running W2008 Datacenter. The primary disk is 23G and the winsxs folder is already taking up 11G of that and I could make good use of some of that space.

Can I reduce this folder in size? I've seen various sites explaining how to do a clean up on Vista after SP1 but see nothing similar for 2008.

My VPS has a secondary hard drive with 70G and there's loads of spare space on that drive. I'd be happy to move the winsxs folder to that drive if that is possible.

 

[mrdenny]

It isn't recommended that you move winsxs. It is better to simply leave it and let it grow as needed. It can grow quite large. Each time you install a patch Windows keeps a version of each file installed so that if applications require a specific version of the file they have access to it.

Denny
MVP
MCSA (2003) / MCDBA (SQL 2000)
MCTS (SQL 2005 / SQL 2005 BI / SQL 2008 DBA / SQL 2008 DBD / SQL 2008 BI / MWSS 3.0: Configuration / MOSS 2007: Configuration)
MCITP (SQL 2005 DBA / SQL 2008 DBA / SQL 2005 DBD / SQL 2008 DBD / SQL 2005 BI / SQL 2008 BI)

My Blog

 

[kmcferrin]

Unfortunately, he's right. Winsxs is probably the single worst idea implemented in Vista/2008 and later, or at least in the way that it was communicated. A lot of our customers have gotten burned because they were used to deploying systems with a 15-20 GB C: partition and are up against the wall, space-wise.

It's even worse if you're using SSDs as your boot partitions, because not only are you "wasting" that space, it's all high-performance disk space. It would be great if they provided some supported method to allow you to move (or specify a different location after install) the Winsxs folder.

________________________________________
CompTIA A+, Network+, Server+, Security+
MCTS:Windows 7
MCTS:Hyper-V
MCTS:System Center Virtual Machine Manager
MCSE:Security 2003
MCITP:Enterprise Administrator

 

[baddos]

If you install SP2 it should clean up some of that data.

 

[kmcferrin]

But it's not just OS patches. It's anything that you install. If you install MS Office, then the Office files are cached in WINSXS. Same goes for Firefox, games, etc. In most cases I find that the size of the OS installed and patches is nothing compared to the size of apps and app patches installed.

________________________________________
CompTIA A+, Network+, Server+, Security+
MCTS:Windows 7
MCTS:Hyper-V
MCTS:System Center Virtual Machine Manager
MCSE:Security 2003
MCITP:Enterprise Administrator

 

[stfaprc]

I made the situation with WINsXS better by booting up with a BartPE disk and then compressing the whole folder and subfolder. this way , the next 'backups' get compressed when written out.

eventually someone will come up with a tool to prune these directories, maybe even microsoft itself.