4 ms·
The idea that removing WinSxS saves space is generally misguided anyway. The vast majority of content there is actually the original file that was used to creat
by binarycrusader 4y ago
The idea that removing WinSxS saves space is generally misguided anyway. The vast majority of content there is actually the original file that was used to create a hard link at the destination. So obviously removing the file doesn’t really save any appreciable amount of space.
The remaining content unique to WinSXS is either for cryptographic validation, app compat, or the driver stack.
- forgotpwd16 4y agoWinSxS also includes backups allowing to revert updates and disabled features. Cleaning up using dism has always recovered me a few GBs.
- binarycrusader 4y agoThe amount of backups in there is fairly minimal and is limited to a folder called “backups”. As for disabled features, the size of disabled features there is also relatively small, not gigabytes. Any space reclaimed using dism’s startcomponentcleanup is only from removal of superseded updates which normally happens automatically whenever the maintenance task runs after a certain period of time. Note that I explicitly consider backups separate from superseded updates. Superseded updates are kept for a period of time to allow the user to uninstall a newer update.
- asveikau 4y agoCame here to say this. WinSXS looks like a huge folder in explorer, because explorer's size estimates do not tell you about hard links. It's not that big. I need to question somebody who thinks removing it will remove a lot of bloat.
- kristianp 4y agoHmm, so how can you see the real size of winsxs?
- binarycrusader 4y agoBrute force? Get the size of every “file” in the volume along with the file id of each and then subtract the size of any files with a matching file id that are in the WinSxS. Then sum the size of the remaining files that were from the WinSxS. You can get the file id using https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winbase/ns-winbase-file_id_info https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winbase/... or fsutil, etc. You could also probably execute “fsutil hardlink list” for every “file” in WinSxS and then ignore any that list more than one result and sum the size of the remainder. There are of course more efficient ways to do this but those are some quick hacks.
- forgotpwd16 4y agodism.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /AnalyzeComponentStore Gives both apparent (seen in Explorer) and actual size.