Cleaning up disk space in SharePoint servers:

This article mainly discusses on the steps to be performed if you happen to come across a scenario where the “C drive”  is filled in the SharePoint server. In our environment we have the SharePoint Servers installed on the C drive and it’s very important that we maintain an adequate amount of free space in the C drive for SharePoint to function seamlessly.

Please use the WinDirStat tool to check the contents in the C drive .This will give you a detailed information about all the folders in the C drive and thus can be used to identify the folders which is larger in space.

WinDirStat Tool:

       WinDirStat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for various versions.

On start up, it reads the whole directory tree once and then presents it in three useful views:

1. The directory list, which resembles the tree view of the Windows Explorer but is sorted by file/subtree size,

2. The tree map, which shows the whole contents of the directory tree straight away,

3. The extension list, which serves as a legend and shows statistics about the file types.

WinDirStat Tool download link :_ http://filehippo.com/download_windirstat/

Listed below are few scenarios that can contribute to the C disk space increase:

1. The Windows update option is set as “ Download updates but let me choose whether to install them”

  If you choose this option in the “Windows update center” then the Windows update service will start to automatically download the updates from the Microsoft Update server and will be waiting for us to install it. The update files in this case will be automatically downloaded to the Software distribution folder(C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download) increasing the C drive space.

Fix:  Please make sure that this option is set to “Check for updates but let me choose whether to install them “. In this case the download center won’t download any updates from the Microsoft servers unless and until we manually click on the “download “button to download the updates. Hence this won’t result in unnecessary disk space increase.

2. Check whether “Diagnostic Logging” is set to “Verbose” in Central Administration. If that’s the case then the log file size will increase rapidly resulting in a disk space increase.

Note:  However, this depends on the path configured for “Diagnostic Logging “.If its set to some other drive other than the “C drive “ then there shouldn’t be any problem.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee748619(v=office.14).aspx

3. Check the space consumed by the logged in user profiles. This can be done by navigating to System properties à User profiles. Check whether the space consumed by all the user profiles is normal .If you see any abnormal increase in the space consumed by any user profile then please go ahead and delete that profile by selecting that user profile and clicking on the “delete” button.

Note: If you delete the user profile from “System properties” then this will remove the user profile from the registry as well. The next time someone logs into the server with that account, a new user profile will be created for that account.