March 22nd, 2016

How can I find out how much disk space the WinSxS folder is really occupying?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

If you ask Explorer or some other disk space utility for the size of the WinSxS folder, you’ll get an inflated value because WinSxS consists mostly of hard links into other parts of Windows, so it doesn’t really occupy space on its own, but naïve disk space calculation algorithms don’t take hard links into account (in part because it’s not clear how one should account for them).

The command to analyze the contents of the WinSxS directory is 

dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /AnalyzeComponentStore

This Web page explains how to interpret the results.

Category
Old New Thing
Topics
Tips/Support

Author

Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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