As a Managed Services Provider, we have hundreds of servers under our management and we are responsible for keeping them healthy. While we all wish that servers were replaced regularly and sized with hard drives that are large enough not to run out of space, that isn’t always feasible given budget or technology constraints. There are still a number of Windows 2008 R2, 2008, or even 2003 servers running in Production with 60GB or 40GB C: drives. With years of Windows Updates that are released monthly and applied (hopefully!), disk space slowly depletes over time.
Depending if the server is physical or virtual, what virtualization technology is used, what Operating System is running on the server, and what resources are available will determine if you can expand the C: drive to alleviate this issue. If you are not able to expand the C: drive, where do you go next? Here is a list of items that I review when I’m hunting for things to delete/purge from a Windows system:
There are also 3rd party tools available to adjust partition/volume sizes if there is another partition/volume with contiguous free space. There is a risk of data loss or server failure with these tools, so be cautious. In general, if you follow the instructions, you should be okay, but you should ALWAYS have a good backup available in case of issue. Your last resort to resolve this issue is to rebuild/replace the server. If you go this route, it would be an opportune time to update to the latest Operating System, and of course make sure to use a larger C: (System) drive when building!
Have any questions about troubleshooting disk space issues or Managed Services? Contact us today!
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