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Re: Where do the gigabytes go?

Eddy Vluggen20-Nov-19 4:27

Eddy Vluggen

20-Nov-19 4:27

You're welcome Smile | :)

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Re: Where do the gigabytes go?

obermd21-Nov-19 3:28

obermd

21-Nov-19 3:28

Eddy Vluggen wrote:
Makes me wonder though how much download-folders are present on the drive

At least one for every self-updating program you have installed. Dead | X|

Re: Where do the gigabytes go?

Rage20-Nov-19 6:19

Rage

20-Nov-19 6:19

It is coming from the uninstall files of the windows updates. Every time a patch is installed by windows update, uninstall files are kept in the windows directory - that's how the patch can be removed if via the windows update menu. With a clean windows install, these are gone, since all the patches are integrated into that newer version of windows directly.

My former PC was old enough to contain several major updates of win7. After cleaning the windows directory containing these uninstall, I could free about 200Gb, which was almost 50% of my disk space. With the drawback of not being able to uninstall old windows update kbs anymore, but who needs that ?

Do not escape reality : improve reality !

Re: Where do the gigabytes go?

Cp-Coder20-Nov-19 7:19

Cp-Coder

20-Nov-19 7:19

If you look at the properties of your system drive and select Disk Cleanup / Clean up system files, you get the option to remove the old files left over by the updates. I do this after every major update.

Re: Where do the gigabytes go?

Nelek20-Nov-19 8:38

Nelek

20-Nov-19 8:38

Why don'T you just take an image of the clean full installed system once done?

AOMEI or Macrium would do the job.

OriginalGriff likes AOMEI, I personally like the Macrium CD more.

I know Hirens is back for Win 10 in a DVD, didn't chekc it yet though.

M.D.V.

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Re: Where do the gigabytes go?

Cp-Coder20-Nov-19 8:43

Cp-Coder

20-Nov-19 8:43

Macrium is my flavor of choice too. The image is already done! Thumbs Up | :thumbsup:

Re: Where do the gigabytes go?

kalberts20-Nov-19 22:00

kalberts

20-Nov-19 22:00

We used to do that at work, frequently restoring a clean machine. This was essentially for the software test setups: We wanted tests to be run in a controlled environment.

It worked OK for the first few weeks, maybe a month or two. But then the Windows Updates started piling up (the security guys in the IT group demanded that we install them all. If you install a six month old image, you have to rerun all the same updates as you did when installing the image the week before, and two weeks before, collected over the six months, plus those of last week. It might take an hour or two running the updates.

I think this must have bothered a lot of users. MS did tune up its update procedures to speed up things. This was a few years ago.

We couldn't wait for the update processing (maybe several times a week). So we made an cleanup script to do all the things mentioned here: Clean up all temp directories (including personal ones in \users\<username>\AppData\Local for all users), the \users\<username>\AppData\pip directory (if you are using Python software), any .log, .temp or .tmp file, uninstall files, browser caches, and a number of locations particular to the tools we are using. Nowadays we are introducing Docker, and if your users are not well behaved and forget to include the -rm option when they run a container, you'll soon have a big pile of stale containers that must be cleaned out by a 'docker system prune'.

To catch the big disk space thiefs, I would recommend TreeSize Free[^] (there is a fancy 'pro' pay version as well, but the free version will do the job). It may run as Administrator, to map space usage in directories you cannot access as a non-prileged user. It certianly is not without flaws, but is is fast, catches the most obvious space hogs, and it is free.

Re: Where do the gigabytes go?

Nelek21-Nov-19 8:28

Nelek

21-Nov-19 8:28

Member 7989122 wrote:
It worked OK for the first few weeks, maybe a month or two. But then the Windows Updates started piling up (the security guys in the IT group demanded that we install them all.

That's why I do a restore, update new image in the "ready to go" version. Keeping a copy of each second updated vm

Yes... I have 8 or 9 copies of Win7 in different states

M.D.V.

Re: Where do the gigabytes go?

kalberts21-Nov-19 21:54

kalberts

21-Nov-19 21:54

That is what I do at my home computer, where I can discard the old image with no worries.

At work, there is a requirement that we - for years into the future - must be able to reconstruct the exact same development environment as was built to generate a given release, capable of building a bit identical copy of the released software. One consequence of that was that we would have to archive every single complete disk image. In principle, we could discard those that was never used for any release, but with many projects and many releases, the management problem would be large and the risk of missing info about a release (and deleting the image used to build it) was large. So we rejected that option.

I am far from being a great lover of Docker (especially on Windows, but even the Linux variant is ... well...), but it does solve a number of such problems. Once you have generated a Docker image, it is not affected by any environment changes (unless, of course, the build script fetches stuff from outside through the network interface). The way we have organized our images, in a multi-layered structure, it is very space efficient as well: If, say, one project requires a couple new/updated Python packages, we make a new image with the old one as base, and run a couple "pip install" to create a "varnish layer" that requires space measured in kilobytes. All the unchanged elements are physically shared with the old image (even at runtime).

So we have few if any disk space issues. Still we have issues: Some developers insist on using the latest and greatest version at any time (this goes particularly for Python packages). We could end up with thousands of Docker images, which would cause a significant management problem. So we let the developers use a "development" Python Docker image in the development phase, allowing downloading of any new version. In the relase phase, they are required to switch to a stable Python image that has disabled any network download: The project presents a list of packet versions they "need", we make a new varnish layer with these packets, and that is what is used for the relase build. This seems to be working fine - at least for now Smile | :)

(But that is for the Linux projects. Windows and Docker... arrrgh. We have given up for now. Maybe it will come later.)

Re: Where do the gigabytes go?

maze320-Nov-19 23:28

maze3

20-Nov-19 23:28

I just want Microsoft to make cleaning the ProgramData folder a none issue.
Each windows update is kept.
Crash reports are practically silent to normal users, and can eat GB of dump logs.

Re: Where do the gigabytes go?

Member 1457777722-Nov-19 8:03

Member 14577777

22-Nov-19 8:03

Just today, I was inspecting a Windows desktop PC that came back from a test setup at our manufacturing partner. It had a 1GB hard drive, with less than 1MB space available.
I looked at %TEMP%, \Windows\SoftwareDistribution, \Windows\Prefetch, \Windows\winSXS, \ProgramData ... no luck.

Then I found 850GB in \Windows\Temp

Apparently, "Disk Cleanup" does not clean up \Windows\Temp

The mind boggles ....

Re: Where do the gigabytes go?

OriginalGriff22-Nov-19 8:04