Moving WSUS files to an external HDD

[PrimaryTech]

Hi All,

 

Our DC is due for retirement in the Summer and I've stripped away most of its non critical roles apart from being a print server and WSUS server. The WSUS files are filling up the largest drive in the DC and I'm looking to move them to a USB drive connected to the DC until our new server is built in the summer.

 

I'm wary of adding USB drives to server machines so I thought I'd ask if anyone else has done this before?

[Steve21]

You sure they'll WSUS files? Only reason I ask is normally it's Windows Updates that make the weird long char based folder names (assuming that's what you mean?) that are added to the largest disk.

 

The real WSUS files are as per the folder they're set in the WSUS config

 

Steve

[pete]

I'd lean towards tidying up WSUS rather than using an USB drive.

 

Have you gone in and declined patches for operating systems you no longer use* and then told it to have a clearout?

 

*just unticking the OS in Options > Products and Classifications doesn't remove the patches from the WSUS store, it just doesn't download any more patches.

 

If you want to clear out XP (for example), you'll need to search for and explicitly decline the XP patches, then run the cleanup. The easiest way is to create a new update view and filter it to just show XP stuff. If you're doing Vista as well, just be careful as there's some 2008/Vista overlap for certain patches.

[PrimaryTech]

I did a WSUS server cleanup that clawed back just over 1GB of space but didn't go through the updates in depth. The drive in question contains the WSUS folder as specified in WSUS.

[dapaulio]

For how easy wsus is to install you can kill many birds with one stone. As I was planning on updating the servers to 2012 I retired my 2008 wsus server. You could assign the role to another server if you are limited to physical servers. We are virtual so had the freedom to boot up a clean server. Just install configure with update classifications you need and change gpo took no more than 30 mins. This will also clear out stale updates that are no longer used by any client. You could probably do that quicker than looking through 4000 odd updates to decline and clean them all.

You know you have a clean server, clean database.

Edited February 9, 2016 by dapaulio