Windows updates -- recovering disk space

[Gordon]

In addition, I'd like to mention that some backup programs allow for
incremental backups;

Which Acronis, the app the OP is using certainly does.

 

[Stan Brown]

I removed the SP1 backup and now my winsxs folder is 6.18 G/B and
the Windows folder is 11.7 G/B.

Thanks for the numbers. I'll report mine when I do it.

If 11 G/B is a third of your disk size I think it's time you raided the piggy bank
and bought yourself a bigger drive. Go for a solid state drive, you won't regret it!
I'll never buy another clockwork disk drive.

No, 11 GB is over a third of the 31 GB that's in use on the C:"
partition. The partition itself is 60 GB, which is 50% above the 40
GB recommended by Microsoft.

 

[Stan Brown]

I did some checking, like you, and found a bit of conflicting information.

There is a claim, that WinSXS is constructed using hard links. And
that means the file exists in two places, installed in the system
somewhere else, but also made to appear like it is in WinSXS. The
overhead of using hard links (extra metadata in the file system)
is about 400MB.

I found that claim to. But someone else posted a rebuttal that
"space on disk" was consistent with it being 11 GB of real files, not
links.

And in just a couple of days it has grown another gigabyte and a
half!

"12,974,353 bytes in 3 files and 13,940 dirs
"12,980,224 bytes allocated"

This is insane! I haven't installed anything. It must be Windows
updates, but I know I didn't get anything like a gig and a half of
them..

 

[Stan Brown]

yes but that's what System Restore is for - there's no need to back up
the SYSTEM (and I'm talking about the OS and installed applications) as
often as you seem to want to - it's a total waste of time IMHO. What you
need to be doing is backing up your DATA (documents, email etc) on a
regular basis then you wouldn't be needing to delete all this stuff in
the first place...

With respect, I don't think that IS what System Restore is for. It
won't restore program settings, stored Firefox profiles, and all that
sort of stuff. Everybody always says, "Oh, don't back up your
programs; you can just reinstall them." But I've spent considerable
time tweaking the preferences the way I like them, and if I had to
reinstall on a new disk I'd have to start from scratch.

Nearly all my documents and data are in other partitions than C:. The
exceptions are what programs put in %APPDATA%. And yes, I back those
other partitions up frequently.

If I could move %APPDATA% elsewhere, I wouldn't have to back up C:
very often at all. Is there a reliable way to move it?

 

[Seth]

With respect, I don't think that IS what System Restore is for. It
won't restore program settings, stored Firefox profiles, and all that
sort of stuff. Everybody always says, "Oh, don't back up your
programs; you can just reinstall them." But I've spent considerable
time tweaking the preferences the way I like them, and if I had to
reinstall on a new disk I'd have to start from scratch.

All the Firefox settings though exist under C:\Users\<Username> which is a
data path and therefore a good candidate for being included in a Data only
backup.

And I agree that's not what system restore is for. I only use it as a way
to get a system up and running long enough to get whatever is missing from
the last backup and then rebuild the system. Other than sudden issues, most
"system corruption" issues are things that have been building for a while so
it would take a system restore from a long time ago or one to retain many
images to go back far enough before the corruption was introduced into the
system. Therefore I do not use system images as a backup but do a clean
build and restore data only.

And for those who say "but it takes so long to reinstall everything" there
are tons of methods of automating a huge part of that and speeding things
up. It just takes a little advance work (much less time than constant whole
image backups) and can then be used numerous times on many systems (I'm the
lead desktop engineer for a 140,000 seat Global enterprise).

Nearly all my documents and data are in other partitions than C:. The
exceptions are what programs put in %APPDATA%. And yes, I back those
other partitions up frequently.

In my opinion, partition drives is so last decade. Makes the system less
manageable, more dispersed and slows down performance (multiple drives
speeds up, multiple partition slows down).

If I could move %APPDATA% elsewhere, I wouldn't have to back up C:
very often at all. Is there a reliable way to move it?

You could redirect the entire profile path to another location.

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

Which Acronis, the app the OP is using certainly does.

Thus making full backups seem less silly for him (and for me) than you
seem to think they are.

Which was my point, made more clear in the part of my reply you didn't
quote

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

I found that claim to. But someone else posted a rebuttal that
"space on disk" was consistent with it being 11 GB of real files, not
links.

And in just a couple of days it has grown another gigabyte and a
half!

"12,974,353 bytes in 3 files and 13,940 dirs
"12,980,224 bytes allocated"

This is insane! I haven't installed anything. It must be Windows
updates, but I know I didn't get anything like a gig and a half of
them..

Conspiracy alert: Microsoft is in cahoots with the drive manufacturers

 

[Gordon]

Thus making full backups seem less silly for him (and for me) than you
seem to think they are.

Which was my point, made more clear in the part of my reply you didn't
quote

Eh? If Acronis does INCREMENTAL backups then you make ONE FULL backup
and incremental after that. No need to take FULL backups at all every
time you make a backup.

 

[Gordon]

If I could move %APPDATA% elsewhere, I wouldn't have to back up C:
very often at all. Is there a reliable way to move it?

<sigh> You don't need to back up the WHOLE of the C drive just to backup
appdata - just backup appdata as part of your regular backup routine...
And if you do incremental backups as Acronis allows you to, then all
that's backed up are the changed files since the last backup.
I do think you are trying to fit a quart into a pint pot over this...

 

[Paul]

I found that claim to. But someone else posted a rebuttal that
"space on disk" was consistent with it being 11 GB of real files, not
links.

And in just a couple of days it has grown another gigabyte and a
half!

"12,974,353 bytes in 3 files and 13,940 dirs
"12,980,224 bytes allocated"

This is insane! I haven't installed anything. It must be Windows
updates, but I know I didn't get anything like a gig and a half of
them..

For fun, I grabbed the .vhd file from a Windows 7 system backup, and copied it
from the laptop backup drive to my WinXP desktop.

Then, I used VirtualPC 2007, to mount the .vhd file in various guest
OSes.

First I tried Win2K, but when I visited the WinSXS directory, there
wasn't any apparent "weirdness" to what I found.

So, next I tried adding the .vhd as a second disk to a Ubuntu virtual
machine.

When Linux deals with NTFS as a file system, I get the impression
it "fakes" certain information, to give Linux something to munch on.
At least, I didn't think that NTFS has "inodes", and yet, when I tried
some experiments, the file system from the laptop was accessible via
inode information. I expect they have some way of translating the
structures in NTFS, in a way that they'd be more compatible with
Linux tools.

http://linuxcommando.blogspot.com/2008/09/how-to-find-and-delete-all-hard-links.html

Now when I visit the WinSXS directory in Ubuntu, at the top level
I see a bunch of directories. I selected a directory at random, and
used the

ls -li

command to list the file contents. That would be the equivalent of
something like using "dir".

The file in there showed

77402 -rw------- 5 username groupid 540,672 bytes 2009-06-10 17:15

The first number is the inode. The "5" is the link count. According to
that blogspot, that means the file has a total of five hard links.

Now, when I used their "find -inum 77402" example command, it only
found a total of four file pointers (hard links) to the same file.
For some reason, I wasn't able to find all five claimed references.

When I attempted a recursive list, starting at the root of the
partition,

ls -liR

and passed the output to "grep", I could only get three references to
the file to show up. This is a bit annoying, and I don't have an answer
yet as to why that is happening.

But at least the experiment seems to show, that for that particular file,
hard links are being used.

I could also find a size discrepancy of around 7GB, using various
tools to look at the partition. The VHD file itself, is
23,980,579,840 bytes, which sets a lower bound on the total file
system size. Various tools claim C: from the laptop is around
30GB, so the numbers don't add up. It's just possible, I haven't run
into a tool yet, that deals with hard links properly.

These are the files that had identical inode numbers, as viewed from Linux.
(I had to copy these by hand, because copy/paste doesn't work...) The
claim is, these all point to the same file, and are hard links. And the
fifth reference, I can't find. I don't know where it might be, or
if it even exists. These files correspond to inode 77402 (which definitely
won't be the same on your computer). What is also curious, is the file
is stored twice in winsxs (two hard links). So one copy of the data,
and at least four pointers to it.

Program Files (x86)/Reference Assemblies/Microsoft/Framework/v3.0/System.Workflow.Runtime.dll
Windows/assembly/GAC_MSIL/System.Workflow.Runtime/3.0.0.0__31bf3856ad364e35/System.Workflow.Runtime.dll
Windows/winsxs/x86_wwf-system.workflow.runtime_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7600.16385_none_64f133bd015a8f4f/System.Workflow.Runtime.dll
Windows/winsxs/msil_system.workflow.runtime_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7600.16385_none_d7f57c8120b07553/System.Workflow.Runtime.dll

Paul

 

[Jake]

Eh? If Acronis does INCREMENTAL backups then you make ONE FULL backup
and incremental after that. No need to take FULL backups at all every
time you make a backup.

I make backups to protect my system from myself mostly but I've seen
Windows updates cause problems.

I have an external USB drive - slow but big and cheap.

I have a C: partition that is OS + development software and a D:
partition that is data.

During the night I have Acronis scheduled to create a new, complete
backup of my C: drive. Before that happens I have a little batch file
that renames existing backups such that I keep 4 days worth of complete
C: backups, dropping the oldest and creating the newest.

I also have a batch run that uses XXCOPY to make a file-by-file copy of
my D: partition, copying only files that are new or changed. XXCOPY is
fast.

All this is so I can do quick recoveries if needed. I can do an instant
restore of the C: partition without having to have it weed through
incremental changes to any backup within the last 4 days, or if I want,
to backups I made at various stages of installation.

If I need a file from the D: backup, I can just grab that file.

I'm a developer so there is a risk of my damaging files, although I can
count the number of times I've needed to restore on one hand. I have had
to restore my C: drive twice after Windows updates have caused problems.
I've had to grab backup files many times over the years after I've
negligently deleted them or otherwise screwed them up.

I think the external drive cost $99.00. I don't know what Acronis costs,
I've been upgrading it for years. There are free imaging programs out
there but I like Acronis scheduling.

All of this is automated, totally transparent, and costs me nothing
beyond the original investment for Acronis and the backup drive.

Peace of mind: priceless

 

[Zaidy036]

I make backups to protect my system from myself mostly but I've seen
Windows updates cause problems.

I have an external USB drive - slow but big and cheap.

I have a C: partition that is OS + development software and a D:
partition that is data.

During the night I have Acronis scheduled to create a new, complete
backup of my C: drive. Before that happens I have a little batch file
that renames existing backups such that I keep 4 days worth of complete
C: backups, dropping the oldest and creating the newest.

I also have a batch run that uses XXCOPY to make a file-by-file copy of
my D: partition, copying only files that are new or changed. XXCOPY is
fast.

All this is so I can do quick recoveries if needed. I can do an instant
restore of the C: partition without having to have it weed through
incremental changes to any backup within the last 4 days, or if I want,
to backups I made at various stages of installation.

If I need a file from the D: backup, I can just grab that file.

I'm a developer so there is a risk of my damaging files, although I can
count the number of times I've needed to restore on one hand. I have had
to restore my C: drive twice after Windows updates have caused problems.
I've had to grab backup files many times over the years after I've
negligently deleted them or otherwise screwed them up.

I think the external drive cost $99.00. I don't know what Acronis costs,
I've been upgrading it for years. There are free imaging programs out
there but I like Acronis scheduling.

All of this is automated, totally transparent, and costs me nothing

To save some time and disk space on your backup look at Chain2Gen here:
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/5940

Works for me on Win 7 Home Premium 64 bit with ATI Home 2010

 

[Stan Brown]

[quoted text muted]

In addition, I'd like to mention that some backup programs allow for
incremental backups;

Which Acronis, the app the OP is using certainly does.

Thus making full backups seem less silly for him (and for me) than you
seem to think they are.

Thank you. I've grown weary of Gordon assuming I'm a low-grade
moron.

 

[Char Jackson]

To save some time and disk space on your backup look at Chain2Gen here:
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/5940

Works for me on Win 7 Home Premium 64 bit with ATI Home 2010

ATI 2011 includes similar functionality within the program now. You
can specify how many backups you want to keep, how old they should be
allowed to get, etc. I'm guessing a program like Chain2Gen would be
obsolete now.

 

[Leon Manfredi]

I make backups to protect my system from myself mostly but I've seen
Windows updates cause problems.

I have an external USB drive - slow but big and cheap.

I have a C: partition that is OS + development software and a D:
partition that is data.

During the night I have Acronis scheduled to create a new, complete
backup of my C: drive. Before that happens I have a little batch file
that renames existing backups such that I keep 4 days worth of complete
C: backups, dropping the oldest and creating the newest.

I also have a batch run that uses XXCOPY to make a file-by-file copy of
my D: partition, copying only files that are new or changed. XXCOPY is
fast.

All this is so I can do quick recoveries if needed. I can do an instant
restore of the C: partition without having to have it weed through
incremental changes to any backup within the last 4 days, or if I want,
to backups I made at various stages of installation.

If I need a file from the D: backup, I can just grab that file.

I'm a developer so there is a risk of my damaging files, although I can
count the number of times I've needed to restore on one hand. I have had
to restore my C: drive twice after Windows updates have caused problems.
I've had to grab backup files many times over the years after I've
negligently deleted them or otherwise screwed them up.

I think the external drive cost $99.00. I don't know what Acronis costs,
I've been upgrading it for years. There are free imaging programs out
there but I like Acronis scheduling.

All of this is automated, totally transparent, and costs me nothing
beyond the original investment for Acronis and the backup drive.

Peace of mind: priceless

I have both Acronis and Paragon 2011 Suites!
I prefer Paragon.....

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

Eh? If Acronis does INCREMENTAL backups then you make ONE FULL backup and
incremental after that. No need to take FULL backups at all every time you
make a backup.

Yeah, so? You are mostly just repeating what I said.

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

[quoted text muted]


In addition, I'd like to mention that some backup programs allow for
incremental backups;

Which Acronis, the app the OP is using certainly does.

Thus making full backups seem less silly for him (and for me) than you
seem to think they are.

Thank you. I've grown weary of Gordon assuming I'm a low-grade
moron.

Looks like I'm in good company, then

 

[Zaidy036]

ATI 2011 includes similar functionality within the program now. You
can specify how many backups you want to keep, how old they should be
allowed to get, etc. I'm guessing a program like Chain2Gen would be
obsolete now.

Chain2Gen is different - at least from what is available thru ATI H 2010.

You decide how many sets of images to keep and the limit of each set. Basis is
quantity, date, day of month, etc.

ATI is set to run on its own timer so can set frequency of images and a batch
controls by running pre-image in ATI settings.

I have ATI set weekly on Saturdays and Chain2Gen set to keep two sets, each set
a full image on the first Saturday of the month and incremental on all
following Saturdays. On the next first Sat. it starts a new set. If max amount
of sets reached it erases earliest one and starts again.

Number of sets limited by the space on your b/u medium and image sizes. I am
using a NAS and running while I sleep and ATI sends an email report after each
run.

Works great and there is an active Forum with advice and help.

 

[Gordon]

[quoted text muted]


In addition, I'd like to mention that some backup programs allow for
incremental backups;

Which Acronis, the app the OP is using certainly does.

Thus making full backups seem less silly for him (and for me) than you
seem to think they are.

Thank you. I've grown weary of Gordon assuming I'm a low-grade
moron.

OK. Let's cut the crap. You were complaining about the fact that when
you do a FULL SYSTEM BACKUP every day/week month or whatever you do it,
that becayuse of the Windows Updates uninstall files you were using
more and more DVDs.
YOU DO NOT NEED TO DO A FULL SYSTEM BACKUP EVERY TIME.
Acronis allows you to do INCREMENTAL backups. Make ONE FULL system
backup and then do incremental ones afterwards.

Simples isn't it?

 

[Stan Brown]

Thanks for the numbers. I'll report mine when I do it.

My results were similar to yours:

BEFORE: WINSXS = 11,250 MB, free space = 31,912 MB
AFTER: WINSXS = 6,538 MB, free space = 35,455 MB

I would feel better about that, except:

WINSXS shrank by 4.7 GB, but free space increased by only 3.6 GB.
Sigh.

Any idea where the extra gigabyte-plus disappeared to? It's not in
the Recycle Bin, which I emptied before running CLEANMGR and which is
still empty afterward.

Did you happen to check size of your Windows folder before he
cleanup? I didn't think to, and now I can't. Since you said 11.7 GB
I'm guessing you mean %WINDIR% and all subfolders. Mine is 14,301
MB, but I don't know what it was before.