Why my windows q0 download files to softwaredistribution

And nearly half of that space is in a single file, dated a year ago. So no, the files don't necessarily get automatically deleted after 10 days. I hope I'm not going off topic but this is easily one of the most hilarious threads I've read in quite a while. I was looking to clean up a recent XP install on a laptop with a 20GB drive. For a few of the posts there, I was starting to buy into the shpiel by Fred Garvin actually, you might want to goog that version of the name for another laugh and was resigned to just leaving the damn thing until it basically exploded.

Anyways, the one part of his advice I took was that I only deleted the contents of the download folder ten days be danged , and I went out there and deleted some of the other folders mentioned. Everything seems to be running fine. I think the problem was that the guy's attitude blew up on his face. He was offering an option, and for some reason he chose to issue it as some sort of directive.

Anyways, I can't stop laughing after seeing his site. One of the jokers in the office says it was made before the internet. I have been reading various posts on this and, like this thread, there is controversy over the prudence of simply deleting them.

Do any of you have any observations on that? It seems related to this thread, but perhaps not. From a clean install of Windows Server R2 Standard, with all updates incl. SP1 installed, it took 15,4 Gb footprint. So, I got back 4 Gb just by doing these two simple points, falling from 15,4 to 11,4 Gb footprint. FYI ElderJedi, believe it. Net Framework timeframe, you might've seen those tags as well. Just like you may start seeing ARM tags once Win8 ships.

At the risk of sounding pedantic, AMD is the one that added the x64 instruction extensions to the x86 chipset, since Intel was off playing with Itanium at the time. When it was clear that the x86 architecture needed bit extensions i. Now, to bring this back on topic, don't delete those files from your WinSXS folder, especially if you're running a bit machine.

Bad things will happen. A senior programmer? A "Senior" would imply someone with knowledge and understanding in their field. I came to this thread to find out some information about the SoftwareDistribution folder and all I found was a bunch of children "member-measuring" in front of each other. ElderJedi, you resorted to abusing another member on the forum like a child and brought no value to the discussion at all.

You talk about. You have a bit processor in your i7 laptop, which is of AMD64 architecture. If I were your employer and read this post, I would be questioning your "senior" position as a programmer, who should know what AMD64 architecture is.

As condescending as Lawrence's post may be, he is right. I couldn't find anything too wrong with anything he stated, as evangelistic as he is. You cannot recommend someone rebuild a server simply because Windows Update doesn't work. That is not and efficient way of thinking, especially when you mentioned the "destruction of data is never the correct answer" in the same breath. When you have a corrupt Windows Update Repository Datastore, sometimes deleting this and allowing Windows Update to repopulate it is the best course of action.

Onto the topic of discussion here. If you are deleting the SoftwareDistribution folder, recreating it and then pushing updates to it and wonder why it's growing If you are worried about space on your system drives, expand them.

You are wasting your employers money playing cleanup duties on system drives when you should be solving real problems in your environment. Sure I may not have added to this forum's topic, but just remember what this forum is "Social. It was never my intent to suggest that somebody should rebuild a server just to repair Windows Update in fact, totally to the contrary.

I absolutely agree. I can see this discussion has been going on for a while. I would have hoped someone from Microsoft or with an MS Support contract might have stepped in and cleared up the matter, but alas seems still left to people with although considerable experience, can't absolutely say for sure what to do about all these files. My main reason for wanting to nuke it is the malware scan is taking forever and I don't see any reason to keep old files that are no longer needed.

I'm going to delete everything prior to I hope I will be safe. But the other point is it seems Microsoft is being a bit sloppy in not doing a better job cleaning up after themselves - imho. Full disclosure I'm running a Vista bit circa so I've had some time to build up files.

But again, why can't Microsoft clean up after themselves better. The scans are taking forever to get through what no doubt is mostly garbage at this point. They should put more focus on their core products, OS and office productivity. Their OS's still seem to have some glaring deficiencies.

No, that's not the same issue. The WinSXS folder is a permanent archive and is designed to be that large on a system with years of patches applied. It's why the disk space requirements for the OS are what they are.

ITPros should learn the architecture and operation of the Operating System before becoming a critic. The fact that you're still running a Vista x64 system in speaks much more to the point than I think you may imagine. And how about to delete only particular folder under "SoftwareDistribution", Datastore? I'm trying to fix wuauclt. If the performance improves, then perhaps, as the MS Answers thread from suggests - it was a defective data store -- however, given that time frame mid and on XP systems, I'm much more inclined to think it was the Office issue.

Around that time frame, a number of systems with Office and 8 years of updates applied, and to a lesser extent even today, some Office systems that are approaching 5 years of updates applied, had performance issues because of the number of update packages in the MSI Installer folder.

For those systems the remediation was to uninstall Office or Office and then reinstall Office with the latest service pack, and then apply the remainder of the required Office patches. But not withstanding that possible scenario, the SD folder is merely a cache of what's on the WSUS server relevant to that particular client, so performance issues are almost always an effect of what's on the WSUS server. You can search this forum for the keyword 'timeout' and find dozens of discussions of this condition.

Your observations seem to make a lot of sense, though I don't pretend to fully understand especially the part about WSUS. I have what I hope are two simple follow-up questions, one related to wuauclt my problem appears to be intense harddrive activity connected with wuauclt and one related to the possible Office reinstall fix.

Re wuauclt, you mention in a different post the need to know what version is running. How do I find that out and what minimum version do I want? Does the fact that it says SP3 mean that my problem would likely not be solved by an Office reinstall?

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 Not always best practice is to put head under the sand, leaving bad project decisions arrive to behave like a malware May be this folder is usefull Space is never taken in account inside Windows That's nothing.

These CU's are now 1GB in size. I've found SoftwareDistribution folders over 6GB in size because updates are just stuck in there. Try 11GB. It's been there for more than 6 months! Were you able to rename the SoftwareDistribution folder, using the steps we shared?

If it remains the same, we recommend that you boot into Safe mode, then change the name of the folder to SoftwareDistribution. Do not worry about doing anything damaging to your computer.

After all, this process only involves removing the historical information of the folder. So, expect for the update process to take more time that it used to, especially since WUAgent will have to check and create the Datastore information.

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Auslogics Blog. Ad Blocker Detected Ad blockers may interfere with some important blog features, such as comments, images, etc. Got it. Once you have deleted the content of the SoftwareDistribution folder, you need to type the following command to activate the services related to Windows Update:.

Right-click on Windows Update service and select Stop. Delete all the files and folders under SoftwareDistribution folder. Again right-click on Windows Update service then select Start.

Now to try to download the Windows updates and this time it will without any issues. Now type the following commands to stop Windows Update Services and then hit Enter after each one:. Next, type the following command to rename SoftwareDistribution Folder and then hit Enter:. Finally, type the folowing command to start Windows Update Services and hit Enter after each one:.

Once you have completed these steps, Windows 10 will automatically create a folder and download the necessary elements for running Windows Update services. If the above step is not working then you can boot Windows 10 into Safe Mode , and rename SoftwareDistribution folder to SoftwareDistribution. Note: The only thing which you may lose in the process of deleting this folder is the historical information.

This folder also stores the Windows Update history information. 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.