As far as I know, you could stop the Update service, then just delete the contents of the DataStore folder. When you restart the service and run Windows updates again.
The file should then get recreated. Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they help and unmark them if they provide no help. Is it safe to delete EDB file? Skip to content Is it safe to delete EDB file? Open the Command Prompt as a Administrator. Above command will delete folder where cache of Windows updates stored. How do I delete all updates from my computer? Hit the Delete-key on the computer keyboard.
Windows may need administrator privileges to delete certain files. Thus, deleting the folder will delete the Windows Update history data from your device. Moreover, the Windows Update process will take more time than it used to take earlier because WUAgent will check and create the Datastore information. Overall, there is no problem associated with the process. It is a small price to pay for getting your device updated with the latest Windows Updates. Whenever you notice Windows Update problems such as Windows Updates files missing, not updating properly, you can opt for this method to restore the Windows Update process.
Aditya is a self-motivated information technology professional and has been a technology writer for the last 7 years. He covers Internet services, mobile, Windows, software, and How-to guides. Your email address will not be published. It's logged at service startup in the WindowsUpdate. It can also be determined by checking the file version of the wuaueng. Not at all. In fact, that you are still running Office makes this a high probability condition.
The mere fact that Office is still installed on a machine suggests that the Office installation has been in place for several years, inasmuch as most systems built after shipped with Office However, I will grant that some organizations have not upgraded, or are unable to upgrade, and are still using Office because it's all they have.
What's the relevant point is how Office has been updated. Thanks, Lawrence, for the direct and to the point reply. I will follow-up on all the observations you made.
This thread was fun to read. Just wiped 8 GiB worth of junk from there. And surely permissions do not work on any other drive. Others have already summed up your "contributions" nicely above, and since my personal experience with your "advise" coming from the WSUS language packs thread - pretty much exactly mirrors what others have observed on this one - nothing more to add here, sir.
Have a nice day. Found this site when looking for folders i can empty in google. I found it quite interesting to follow you. But noone could say how it will affect the system.
After the discussion about WinSXS the idea came up to look in the registry if anything does refer to any of the content in there Im just a regmanipulating nerd. Since i am kid i love to check and manipulate all the files with systeminformation in it, to tune up system manually, free space, as it was in old times with ms dos freeing space in the kb base memory Well, let's hope you're not a financial advisor.
I had to read it again to make sure you really said "condescending" in one breath and "switch to Mac" in the next. Garvin The views expressed on this post are mine and do not necessarily reflect the views of SolarWinds.
The Windows folder takes up 7. You need to recognize that your personal experience does not reflect the personal experience of everyone else. Thank you for the information that Download content over 10 days old can safely be deleted regardless of whether it is aesthetically pleasing ; I will proceed to do so. I have a few servers running Windows Server and they are all experiencing greatly diminished disk space in the system partition. I checked the SoftwareDistribution folder on one server and it's topping 2.
The Download subfolder contains files dating back to when the server was new. Are you certain this folder is automatically maintained? The system partition is down to 1. Needless to say, but I will be manually cleaning up the Download folder.
The design is for the folder to be automatically maintained. However, it's not unheard of for the datastore to get out of sync with the content cache.
As noted previously, anything older than 10 days can be deleted. Following that you should monitor the folder to see if subsequent files get deleted as they should. If they don't, the datastore may have inconsistencies.
An option in this case is to rebuild the datastore. Rename the SoftwareDistribution folder. Copy the old ReportingEvents. Not really sure where you stopped reading, since you didn't quote the message you're actually responding to But never make the mistake of confusing "arrogance" with accuracy, or the right to aggressively defend one's beliefs in those facts. True, perhaps you don't like the confidence with which I chose to make my points.
I accept that. As for "without any explanation" My take was that I explained the basic points several times over. If you feel there's something lacking in any of the above responses, I'm most happy to expand on the subject. I'm blown away by the arrogance of your "answers.
To speak in such absolutes without any explanation as to why makes me want to argue with you just because of your arrogance. I have come across this thread a few times or a similar one with Lawrence stating that it is just wrong to mess with that folder and can usually only get about posts down.
As a consultant, I see a number of servers and I need to check my memory each time because I have seen so much. I have had a couple of servers with a 12 GB C: drive.
A lot of these files could be up to 4 years old. I have not had access to these servers previously, and I am looking to replace these servers as soon as possible, but when the C: drive drops to a couple hundred MB, the server is in danger of crashing due to space issues. These have been servers that for the most part, no one was doing updates on a regular basis.
It is not until pretty low in the exchange that you mention that it is possible that there may be a reason to move or delete the files. It is not the most helpful of responses. I understand that you want to stress the fact that it should not be done, and I can appreciate that.
But if you could stress that and then explain early in, that there may be some rare situations that it could be used, it could make for a better read. I have come across this thread a few times or a similar one with Lawrence stating that it is just wrong to mess with that folder. Then monitor the client to see if it continues to properly self-maintain the folder thereafter. One other note Of course, it's also worth noting that any server with only a 12GB system partition was already in trouble the day the operating system was installed onto it.
In that case, you must also focus on other space consuming resources, because you still need another 2GB of free space beyond that. People don't arbitrarily decide to go delete random folders from their systems, they're looking for answers to this question for a specific reason. Per Mr. Garvin's own posting, if the SoftwareDistribution folder has grown large and contains old content, then by definition it's NOT a properly functioning system, so all the sturm und drang over whether it's a best practice for a properly working system is irrelevant.
I think the question here is the proper methodology to diagnose and remediate that not-working system. There's no harm in compressing the folder So I have read this post from top to bottom and agree with most things that were said. With that said though, you always talk about an update agent being corrupt or the datastore being corrupt and not really giving any troubleshooting steps to fix either of them. I work for a small company working on servers that are way beyond there retiring age but have to because we just can't spend the money every other year to replace them.
I have gone through about 6 of my servers now and everyone of them have the downloads folder with updates going back several years. So I have been deleting the ones that are several years old and leaving the most current one. I get updates all the time and rarely do have ones that are failing. So I am not sure why the files are getting so big. These servers were all built with 10GB max as the OS drive because that was all that was recommended at the time. With the select few that i have virtualized, i have been able to give extra space to the OS partition.
The ones that I have not done is because the are mission critical and need to be up at all times. I also understand that this is for IT Pros, but to talk to other professionals as if they were below you gets you little to no respect. I almost started skipping the post that you made because of the comments that you made and the lack of humility that you have. Show a little respect for some IT pros that are looking for answers, instead of just being told NO. There are doctors that might be able to help take that claw out.
And if you still feel strongly about being c ondescending for those asking questions. Find a new line of work were no one asks you questions!! Fair enough, Brad, but to be honest, there really aren't any "troubleshooting steps" per se. There are a couple of symptoms that will appear in a WindowsUpdate. There's not a lot of information available about how the WUA actually works internally, or how it should work. Most of what we know is based on several years of empirical observations.
One observation that applies is that once the datastore and download cache get out of sync, the housekeeping routines don't delete anything. Deleting the files older than 10 days usually will restore normal functionality of that housekeeping task. If it doesn't, and space is that critical, you might also find it beneficial to rebuild the entire datastore.
I had already done your 4 straightforward steps - except 4b 'restoring the log file'. I did a simple Copy of that log file kb to the Desktop which appeared to work, but all of my attempts to restore it with a simple Paste described above refuse to work. If so, will the log file I had already copied with a simple Copy to the Desktop still work with your 2nd command? If it freaks out, it could be that the WUA has the file locked.
Stop the WindowsUpdate service, copy the logfile back, and restart the service. What an interesting read. It took only three years of discussion for an actual answer with actual instructions to be posted.
For the great length of this thread, instead of helpful information, there are accusations of you should know better of course, if everyone knew better, these forums would be superfluous , such as :. Such a reference would have been useful, but you don't actually provide one. Later in the thread, you contradict yourself and indicate that such a primer does not actually exist:. Back in , when these systems were installed, it wasn't unreasonable to consider that to be more than sufficient for an OS, with room to grow.
Mostly I am talking about systems belonging to small businesses with no WSUS, just automatic updates direct from MS and reboots once every blue moon or so. Under these conditions, in my experience a Software Distribution that self-polices itself is a rarity. Having read through the majority of this thread, it is still a mystery to me how to determine if the datastore and the downloads folder are out of sync, or where the magic number of older than 10 days comes from.
Other than a self appointed expert who admits he doesn't have a lot of information about how WUA actually works says so. Irrespective of anything said in the debate above, empirical testing certainly reveals that there are times when the only viable solution for the layman IT Administrator, will be the removal or re-naming of the SoftwareDistribution folder. With that said, scheduling the removal of the folder does seem pretty extreme. We run Win 7 VDI desktops over here with very tight disk space requirements, and we've never seen a problem that suggests we should consider that.
We now look at this step as a viable and reasonable solution when specific problems such as the one described by that post occur from time to time. Which in most environments would hopefully be quite irregular, rather than the norm. I have resolved the issue through more normal means but I am nonetheless curious why clearing SD folder did not resolve the issue as it would normally inside Windows.
It went a bit crazy downloading 11 copies of the same patch wacserver-x-none. It really shouldn't be beyond the Microsoft engineers to copy the unix guys with a real or virtual temp partition that can be wiped at the whim of the IT maintainers. Is it NOW okay to clean up the mess? If not, then when? If the answer is never, then I can see why MS isn't doing so well anymore The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.
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