Solved Winsxs folder in Windows 7 Ultimate

[bigbingo]

Hi All,

I have Windows 7 Ultimate 64, and found out that the folder "winsxs" contains besides "backup" folder also more than 21,400 folders with about 9GB of files. Are those files really needed?

Thanks

 

[Urthboundmisfit]

Hi All,

I have Windows 7 Ultimate 64, and found out that the folder "winsxs" contains besides "backup" folder also more than 21,400 folders with about 9GB of files. Are those files really needed?

Thanks

The WinSxS is not as large as it "appears" to be; See this excellent post by Barman58 for an explanation.

HTH

 

[bigbingo]

Thanks for your response.
Unfortunately I used the vssadmin but it did not reduced the the size of "winsxs" folder still more than 9GB!
Any suggestions?

Thanks

 

[LMiller7]

The vssadmin command is used to manage restore points and other shadow storage. As mentioned by Barman58 these are not stored in the Winsxs folder and thus will not be effected by vssadmin.

The large size of the winsxs folder is only apparent, not real.

 

[Urthboundmisfit]

...the size of "winsxs" folder still more than 9GB!
Any suggestions?

Thanks

Apparently you did not understand Barman's post I linked to. The winsxs folder is not as large as it "appears" to be, it typically contains 10's of thousands of hard links. Windows Explorer often double, triple quadruple, etc counts the disk space occupied by these files. What Explorer sees as a file "contained" in WinSxS is actually accessed via a link to a directory where the file is physically stored. Explorer is not aware of the difference between an actual file and a hard link to a file, and so may count the same file several times, adding incorrectly to disk usage. The disk usage reported by Explorer is as if each hard link is an actual file.

Further reference: https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2795190/en-us

The component store contains all the files that are required for a Windows installation. And, any updates to those files are also held within the component store as the updates are installed. This causes the component store to grow over time as more updates, features, or roles are added to the installation. The component store uses NTFS hard links between itself and other Windows directories to increase the robustness of the Windows platform.

The component store will show a large directory size because of how the Windows Explorer shell accounts for hard links. The Windows shell will count each reference to a hard link as a single instance of the file for each directory in which the file resides. For example, if a file that is named advapi32.dll is 700 KB and is contained in the component store and in the \Windows\system32 directory, Windows Explorer would inaccurately report that the file consumes 1,400 KB of hard disk space.

Hope this helps clear things up for you.

 

[bigbingo]

Thanks