A Windows System Admin's Blog

I was recently tasked with performing a clean-up of some of our servers, removing old files/software installations as well as a clean-up of our WSUS server.  After a quick look I could see that our previous administrator had set it to download Driver updates as well, which was taking up quite a large amount of space and something that we wern’t really looking at using (no driver updates were approved).

So I ran the WSUS clean-up wizard, which removed some old computers, but the driver updates remained. I wanted them gone.  So I quickly made sure that driver updates category wasn’t selected and ran the following PowerShell script on the WSUS machine.

[reflection.assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.UpdateServices.Administration") | out-null
$wsus = [Microsoft.UpdateServices.Administration.AdminProxy]::GetUpdateServer();
$cleanupScope = new-object Microsoft.UpdateServices.Administration.CleanupScope;
$cleanupScope.DeclineSupersededUpdates = $true
$cleanupScope.DeclineExpiredUpdates         = $true
$cleanupScope.CleanupObsoleteUpdates     = $true
$cleanupScope.CompressUpdates                  = $true
#$cleanupScope.CleanupObsoleteComputers = $true
$cleanupScope.CleanupUnneededContentFiles = $true
$cleanupManager = $wsus.GetCleanupManager();
$cleanupManager.PerformCleanup($cleanupScope);

This script took about an hour to run but worked like a charm. It basically cleaned up the whole WSUS database, removing old computers, obsolete and unneeded updates (including the drivers I no longer wanted) as well as removing the associated update files which cleaned up a lot of space. The script above is modified so as not to remove computers from the database but that can be simply uncommented and included in the script.

Let me know in the comments if you found this useful.