Windows Server sbs 2008 clean up

right click on the drive, select properties, disk cleanup, advanced, clean up system files. Cheapest and fastest solution, buy a larger disk and image over to the new disk

I respectfully disagree with you, David. Simply imaging to a new drive just copies over the junk. While that may ultimately be the best course of action, before going that route I would take a little bit of time (30 minutes to an hour) to see what can be cleaned up before going the route of spending $ on hardware that is a little older (we are talking about SBS 2008 after all).

Also, while disk cleanup is a viable option, I have found that it rarely yields enough of a difference in my experience. Treesize has historically given me a faster result and shown me where the space hogs were, and there rarely has been a correlation of significance between what treesize shows (that I've been able to clean up manually) and the disk cleanup option. By all means, run the disk cleanup option, but in the end that likely will not yield a significant amount of space. At least that's been my experience.

Another question to goodfinder: is the OS consuming the entire physical disk, or is it on a partition of the physical disk? If it is running on a partition, it may be possible to resize the partition (I've used third party tools for this as well, with a really good rate of success.

Hope this is helpful,

Jonathan

Only you and your users know what files need to be kept, and which ones can be removed. You could move old, static files that don't get changed anymore to a NAS (still make sure you have backups of them).

If on the other hand it is the OS partition that is getting full, then you can delete the contents of C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Downloads.

Make sure your full backups are successful so that the transaction logs for exchange get deleted.

If you have multiple partitions / drives and if it's the OS drive that's getting full, a quick fix is to reconfigure the pagefile to be on drive D. On SBS there are some default databases for monitoring etc. which can grow quite big. As previously suggested, use treesize (it's free) and find the biggest files and folders. If it's 2008 with SP2 SBS (not R2) you can also use a tool called compcln.exe which will clean up your WINSXS folder. WINSXS tends to grow over time with the installation of service packs / patches etc.

Albatross99 is right - that is an easy fix, however make sure that you keep at least a very small page file on the C drive. if you don't, and the D drive becomes unreachable, it *CAN* cause your system to become un-bootable. Shouldn't, but I have seen it happen.

Here's some good information about compcln if you're not familiar with it:

Microsoft community: To use or not to use compcln.exe' that is the question....

In response to Rindi, I suggest not simply deleting the contents of the software distribution folder. There is a more preferred way to deal with that. go here for more information:

Microsoft community: Is it safe to delete files Under C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution\Download

Hope this helps,

Jonathan