Note that part of the size of WinSxS is an illusion because basically everything there is hard linked from elsewhere on the system (yes, NTFS supports hard links). There are some ways to do limited cleanup on it, but it's not a place to poke around in manually.

More depth: https://www.thewindowsclub.com/winsxs-folder-windows-7-8

I Have found via experimentation and freespace monitoring that most of the size of the winsxs folder that explorer shows when you look at properties, is infact eaten off the drive.

Its a royal pain in the ass for 120GB ssd installs or smaller.

Yes but isolated registry backups make as much sense as a full backup of a modern Linux Desktop's /etc folder. Probably not much. The config's content depends a lot on the things installed and vice-versa, even more so on Windows (unless they changed something fundamentally since 7). At least on Linux and in particular Ubuntu (Desktop) installations I aim for as little manual configuration changes as possible anyways, so updates don't break things...

If you backup etc and home, you can pretty much restore a linux machine back to working order. Yes, you might be missing packages in a brand new install, but then the extra files are harmless.

People put etc in git even: https://joeyh.name/code/etckeeper/

The registry is much more magical and it is difficult to find and remove cruft, so I suppose there's an argument against it.

There are more reasons than backups to use etckeeper; I use it in case a package upgrade mangles my config files (happened once).

Imagine the use case in reality. You accidentally rm -rf your /etc folder but you still have the git tree. /etc itself is gone, entirely. Most of your tools will seize working almost immediately, the only chances you have are having a terminal already open to a root shell. Your Virtual TTYs on other screens won't work (login uses /etc/passwd, which is gone) as well as any sudo command.

Recovery from the life system is likely impossible unless you have a root shell open and git doesn't refuse to work (it might since it checks for /etc/gitconfig, if you made any critical settings here, git stops working). Live recovery also has other issue; some apps might still be writing to or reading from /etc. They might have an open handle. Recovery will result in some processes of the same binary running with different configurations. That will be a joy to discover once it inevitably starts to corrupt the system stability.

So your only way of meaningful recovery is a live system on a USB stick. Do you have one ready to use right now? Like, not prepared in a shelf somewhere but right now is there a live linux system within your reach? If not, it's rather likely it will take a while to find it.

Once you've done that, you can bootup your computer, unlock any encrypted disks you use and install git into the live system. Then you hopefully remember how to recover a git repo using it's tree only, if not, hopefully the live disk's network works.

If recovery succeeds over git, you can reboot and pray the last checkpoint in git isn't too old. Have you changed the LUKS keys in the meantime and did you forget to checkin crypttab? Or did you change your Xorg Conf because X stopped working?

The short answer is; it might be easier and just as complex to simply reinstall the system while backing up your home folder.

>If you backup etc and home, you can pretty much restore a linux machine back to working order.

Hmm, I've never done this. In terms of config files, are there never any breaking changes between versions? Like ..is a v1.0 config file always guaranteed to work with v2.0 and vice versa? I guess and a related question - what is the best way to determine if an /etc/ config file isn't required?

Usually breaking changes are highlighted in your update cycle and if something is added or slightly modified you might find a *.conf.rpmnew or similar. rpmconf [1] helps with those sorts of updates.

[1]: https://github.com/xsuchy/rpmconf

Stuff can break - there's not especially strong guarantees across versions, but if I, say, took /etc and /home from a Debian stretch system and put them on another Debian system, it would likely mostly Just Work.

It gets more exciting the further you drift - e.g. if you're going to Debian buster, or something more significantly different like Fedora/RH, you'd probably want to cherrypick config changes from /etc, though /home should be fine(tm).

etckeeper records the exact package version changes too. it's extremely handy for small shops (so unless you do 100% immutable infrastructure, it's worth it)

you start culling packages with apt purge, that should remove config files too, and see what breaks, if nothing, well, try to push your luck further.

also with dpkg -S /etc/some/file you can see which file belongs to which package and target that package

usually on a server you know what you don't need. it's a bit more trial and error on a desktop. (because those can break in a lot more fun, unexpected ways, harder to know what is needed)

Isolated registry backups are handy if you do a lot of poking around in the registry by hand or if you're about to install a .reg file. Regardless, the dialog box actively lying to the user is what's completely unacceptable.

But config not being read by things not installed does not hurt either. And once I install these missing things, the config is read again. And I usually spend a lot more time with configuration than with installing...

There's a key difference though. In Linux and other UNIX inspired OS's /etc is only accessible by root but the Windows registry holds config data for users too. Any userspace program in Windows could potentially bork any registry key that the user has access too.

Well, the backups of /etc on my home server helped me many times. I would advise anybody to do them.

Agree on the 50-100MB being minuscule. I don't even provision a Windows VM without 60G worth of space due to how bad it is on cleaning itself up/bloat.

I wasn't even able to install Windows 7 a few months ago due to the WinSxS folder continuously bloating to fill the disk (stock on a T440p - super weird issues). It's almost as if they broke new-install update cycles on Win7 on purpose =/

My question is why the hell would they turn off a feature like this in the first place?! What is the actual "money making" motivation behind the decision?

That sounds like something was seriously wrong with your install. I am on a desktop running windows 10 since its release on which I use daily and install a lot of software - and the windows folder is sitting at 12 GB.

> the windows folder is sitting at 12 GB

I don't think the Windows folder is a particular good indication of Windows space usage.

A while ago Microsoft put a tablet killer design out there: 11 Screen, 4GB RAM, Touch Screen and 32GB SSD. Man+dog shipped them. Then man+dog found the machines died because Windows ran out of disk space on patch Tuesday. So regardless of what is in the windows directory 32GB is not enough to run Windows.

We "fixed" the problem by replacing Windows with Linux. Total size of Linux install, which included Libre Office and a selection of browsers: less than 4GB.

Microsoft attempting to fix the size issue by removing 100M of backups when the scale of the problem they are trying to solve is 4GB vs 32GB is a almost laughable.

As an owner of one of these early tablets(quad core atom, 1GB ram, 32GB SSD) I can confirm that you cannot install updates anymore after a while, even when there's a few GB left, the system just refuses to proceed.

My mother's Intel NUC runs into this problem. Next time I go to visit I think I'm going to have to figure out if we can move the Windows install off the 32GB eMMC onto something else...

I have the same issue, just with Android tablets.

Two of the worst offenders - the swap and hibernation files - don't live in the Windows folder.

I wonder if it's related to the trend in recent years of manufacturers marketing ultra low-budget Windows 10 laptops (and to a lesser extent tablets) with critically small amounts of non-upgradeable storage? An install of Windows 10 typically takes up ~26GB and there's already a problem with consumers discovering that their 32GB soldered eMMC machines are unable to perform any OS updates without jumping through extra hoops with external storage [0].

[0] https://www.dell.com/support/article/ie/en/iedhs1/sln310147/...

Those machines are already mostly unusable under Windows because MS only requires 2GiB minimum so it's an instant swapfest to eMMC. Put Linux on them and they're quite nice.

I disagree - I have one with a quad core atom, 1GB of ram(!!!) And latest windows 10 1903 edition runs very nicely on it if you stick to the built-in apps. I usually have it next to my main PC as an additional monitor with the wireless projector functionality .

Windows 10 runs very nicely... If you only want to use the machine as an external monitor? Respectfully, this doesn't seem like a very realistic use case for most people.

That's not what I said. I said it runs really nicely if you stick to the built-in apps, and that I use mine as an external monitor. Those two are not mutually exclusive.

I'll hazard a guess that your Win10 machine on 1GB RAM is swapping plenty. A lightweight Linux distribution can run a reasonable desktop workload (including some web browsing!) on 1GB with zilch swap use, or on as little as 512MB with tolerable use of swap. It's a bit disappointing in a way, but Linux (and not even every Linux distro, for that matter) is the only OS where I can visibly tell that I'm running something reasonably bloat-free, and it makes the UX incredibly snappy and comfortable all-around.

No, Windows did not eat your RAM. Your "guess" would be wrong. I've installed Win 10 to 1GB VM machines many times. The OS itself takes a little over 512 of RAM in this scenario. No swapping at all if your not using any apps more than 512MB.

The reason you probably are assuming Win 10 is unusable is that on your 8 or 16GB machine Windows uses free RAM to speed things up. It's is smart enough to not do this on memory constraints setups.

Funny thing is Linux users often made this same mistake with "free -m", hence the need for this site: https://www.linuxatemyram.com/

I've had to install and run Windows Server 2016 on an XP-era desktop with 256MB RAM... oh it was painful, agonisingly painful, with constant swapping. But it worked!

Well, i'm here to say that if you use a normal linux distro with KDE or Gnome your going to be in the multiple GB's of ram pretty quick. Sure you can have a stripped down linux distro with X/lxde or whatever in under 1GB, but you can also use windows IoT or Core for much the same effect.

The problem is that MS (and the mainstream linux DE's) aren't willing to admit that some of the "modernization" they have done over the last decade has done nothing but increase the visual lag while massively increasing the resource consumption for what is frequently little more than transparent windows (cause high DPI is still not quite there in both cases...).

That's not really true.

My KDE is running in < 600MB right now. It's Chrome, Spotify and Slack that are eating memory.

Also, at least in KDE you can set animation speed to instant and get immediate feedback.

It's super stable, usable and polished.

One of the earliest Win10 updates was "bricking" machines if a device was in the SD card slot during the update process. Guess where my update media were?

The machine became a Debian machine. It was "bricked" only to the extent that there was no way forward from the failed update to getting Windows back.

Reminds me of my Nokia 3 which is stuck in a non up-gradable loop. What I think is happening is that the the new image is downloaded to the SD card, then when you restart to upgrade the SD card isn't mounted so the upgrade fails, then you reboot again and you've lost all your shortcuts to apps on the SD card. I'm not sure if it's the image itself on the SD card or something else required but it's obvious Nokia don't spend much on QA.

Marginal gains.

50MB here, 100MB there ... pretty soon you're talking real storage usage.

Pretty much this. I once tried adding a new ~3 MB binary, and it was rejected on effectively these grounds. Now consider that the team making these in/out decisions has a backlog of requests just like it for larger items...

Is there a team that can exterminate other teams in very medieval ways that fail to make stuff installable to non system drive?

Because there should be.

It's crazy that everything still wants to put stuff on C:\ ... I'm looking at you Visual Studio and Win SDK.

Plus Users\Public shared goodies. And the %userprofile%\AppData. I get that every application thinks it needs to put its cache/files there, but then why can't folks relocate users' homes? :/

> Is there a team that can exterminate other teams in very medieval ways that fail to make stuff installable to non system drive?

I'd love if that team would also take a look at Android, where you simply can't not install on the "system drive" aka. main phone flash.

That was a design decision made because install to SD card causes apps to load slowly (to my understanding). It used to be possible but they killed it.

Doesn't hurt that it helps speed up the upgrade cycle since users run out of on-board space sooner.

Some 10 of those and it makes some difference on a phone...

In how many places does Windows concentrate the settings for everything?

3 in this case ... registry, registry backup and system restore points.

Makes sense to get rid of one of those, especially as restoring a registry backup can lead to unintended issues if you've installed something since, whereas a system restore point takes care of all of that for you.

Between the traditional Disk Cleanup and a quick DISM cleanup (which should already be running as a scheduled task) you can get pretty good results on any Windows 8.1/2012R2 and above:

Dism.exe /online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup /ResetBase

More info on what that does: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactur...

I don't really see the need to have the ability to uninstall service packs... Especially not if it's wasting 25% of the space on my tiny SSD!

The original windows installation media could be used to restore the system if something went horribly wrong anyway. Why the need to keep every previously used version of every dll?

Because Microsoft. We will lie to you about making registry backups successfully to save a few megs of space, bud god forbid we touch the winsxs elephant in the room.

Because Windows doesn't always have access to the installation media, even when it is a partition on the same drive?

There was an Insider blog post somewhat recently about Windows 10 trying to repack things into installation media over time, when it's a recovery image on the local machine. It sounds like they are working to better the situation.

> quick DISM cleanup (which should already be running as a scheduled task)

Is this a recommendation/suggestion of yours, or a default state?

Last I knew you had to set it up yourself.

I'm using Dism++ (GUI) for this job https://www.chuyu.me/en/index.html

These are some pretty privileged operations you're trusting the tool to perform. I'm not sure a couple of commands warrant using a GUI tool, especially one that doesn't seem to inspire too much confidence upon cursory examination.

https://github.com/Chuyu-Team/Dism-Multi-language/blob/maste...

Is this open sourced?

Only the parts that they took from other reverse engineered header projects are opensource (because they have to). They answered on one of their Github issues that the actual core code is not open source. I wouldn't touch this.

Of all the stuff crammed automatically on Windows 10 install .. they can't be serious about saving space.

I had to powershell candycrush off the drive for god's sake.

The candycrush install trigger is annoying but mere KB, it's not disk space bloat.

I'm not sure it's always the case. They were accounted for hundreds of MB. Removing them (many games) increased free space.

Looking into it further, apparently windows keeps a secret cache even after you uninstall those apps, so powershell is necessary not just to remove the install trigger but to remove that extra copy. Thanks, windows.