disc cleanup

maranna said:

1803 cumulative updates take so long to be cleaned up with disc cleanup.
I do so b/c I want to have a clean image in case I have to recover.
Is there a faster way to clean up these updates?

Maranna, yep it takes a bit. Keep in mind what it is actually doing. The Disk Cleanup is not just deleting files, that would be fairly quick. There is a lot of work going on by a process called TiWorker, part of TrustedInstaller. You can see it in Taskmanager during the cleanup. It is compressing old patch files and deleting what it can, and applying older super-ceded patches permanently. So there really is no faster way, and certainly no safer way. You just need to let it churn. Nature of the beast.

maranna said:

I certainly appreciate you're very in-depth explanation and I'm willing to wait to have it done properly thank you

Quite welcome!

Thanks for asking the question @maranna and thank you for the explanation @f14tomcat I was wondering the same thing yesterday afternoon. LOL a quick update made for a loooong clean up on both machines. Now I can quit wondering "what's wrong with that".

Wiley Coyote said:

Thanks for asking the question @maranna and thank you for the explanation @f14tomcat I was wondering the same thing yesterday afternoon. LOL a quick update made for a loooong clean up on both machines. Now I can quit wondering "what's wrong with that".

You know you're in for a long haul if Disk Clean up says there are 3.99TB of update backups that can be cleaned.



This apparently impossible figure is due to hard links, a way to make the same file appear in multiple places. Disk Clean up counts each appearance towards the total. When there are a lot of hard links the 'total' becomes highly inaccurate. Unfortunately TiWorker still has to clean up the hard links as well as the actual file, so it can take a long time...

Determining the size of the Windows Component Store is complicated by the fact that many of the files are used by Windows from directories outside the Windows Component Store using a technique known as hard linking. In such cases, the files from a component version appear both inside and outside the Windows Component Store. By using hard linking Windows is able to appear to keep multiple copies of the same file without actually taking the added space for multiple copies.

Analyze Component Store (WinSxS folder) in Windows 10

Mooly said:

Long clean-ups have become an all to familiar part of the W10 process unfortunately. Think of all the electrical energy expended globally to perform that one routine.

Not just W10. W7 and W8 have now adopted a monthly rollup update pattern, much the same as W10's cumulative updates. I have on occasion seen Disk Clean up show 3.99TB of updates to be cleaned on a Windows 7 machine