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24 October 2023  Ashley S. Miller  Specialist of Customer Service Dept.
 

Summary
Learn how to safely clean up your WinSxS folder and increase your computer's free storage space with the help of this article. You can use Renee Undeleter if you find the deleted files.



Table of contents

table iconI. What is the WinSxS folder?
table iconII. How to clean up the WinSxS folder?
table iconIII. When deleting data by mistake, use Renee Undeleter to recover
How to clean up WinSxS folder

I. What is the WinSxS folder?

The WinSxS folder exists in the C:\Windows path and is an essential Windows component storage folder in the “Windows” folder. The WinSxS folder contains files for disabling and enabling Windows features, switching Windows versions, recovering damaged or missing system files, and pretty much everything else that makes up the operating system. When installing Windows updates, the WinSxS folder stores different versions of necessary components, which can come in handy if you need to remove problematic updates.
winSXS properties
Be aware that deleting files from the WinSxS folder, or deleting the entire WinSxS folder may severely damage your system, making your computer potentially unbootable and unable to update. If you want to clean up the WinSxS folder safely, you can use Windows 10 Storage Sense, Disk Cleanup Tool and Command Prompt to complete this task. The specific operation method will be introduced below.

II. How to clean up the WinSxS folder?

1. Through storage perception

The Windows 10 system includes a storage awareness function that allows users to delete temporary files conveniently. We can safely clean up the WinSxS folder through this function.
Step 1: Left click on (Start) > (Settings), select (System) > (Storage) in Windows Settings. Then click (Temporary Files), if you do not find this option, please click (Show More Categories).
check computer storage
Step 2: After clicking (temporary file), you need to wait patiently for a moment to check the size of each temporary file. Then select (Windows Update Cleanup) > (Delete Files).

2. Use the disk cleanup tool

The Disk Cleanup tool can also be used to delete some temporary system files, which can help reduce the size of the component store.
Step 1: Search (Disk Cleanup) in the lower left corner of the taskbar, then select the drive to be cleaned (such as system disk C:), and then click (OK).
disk cleanup
Step 2: Check (Windows Update Cleanup) in the “Files to delete” box, and then click (OK).

3. Through the command prompt

We will run Dism.exe in Command Prompt with some command parameters to reduce the size of the WinSxS folder.
Step 1: Enter (cmd) in the search box, right-click the search result, and select (Run as administrator) to open the command prompt window.
run command prompt as administrator in start menu
Step 2: In the opened command prompt window, type (Dism.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /AnalyzeComponentStore) and press (Enter) to view the actual size of the WinSxS folder.
Enter the AnalyzeComponentStore command
Step 3: If you feel that the WinSxS folder occupies too much space, please continue to enter the (Dism.exe /online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup) command and press (Enter), this command will immediately delete the previous version of the update component (no 30 days grace period).
Enter the DISM and sfc commands
Step 4: In addition, you can also enter the (Dism.exe /online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup /ResetBase) command. According to Microsoft’s official instructions, this command will delete all superseded versions of each component in the component store, but after this command is completed, all existing update packages cannot be uninstalled, but this will not prevent future update packages from being uninstalled, so please Act after careful consideration. If it prompts that the execution of this command fails, please stop the Windows Search service before running this command.
StartComponentCleanup used with ResetBase parameter
The above is the method to safely clean up the WinSxS folder, I hope it will be helpful to everyone. If you accidentally delete data while using the computer, you can refer to the third part to scan and restore it.

III. When deleting data by mistake, use Renee Undeleter to recover

1. What is Renee Undeleter?

Renee Undeleter is a software specially designed to restore various data files. When you accidentally delete important files, empty the recycle bin, or format the disk/storage, you can use this tool to find the lost data back. This software covers four functional modules, including file recovery, format recovery, partition recovery and image creation, so it can help you solve many data loss problems that may occur during system use in an all-round way, which is very convenient.
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2. How to recover lost files with Renee Undeleter?

Restoring data with Renee Undeleter is very simple, the specific steps are as follows:
Step 1: Download, install and run Renee Undeleter on a Windows computer, and select Fast Partition Scan on the main interface.
Note: Do not install the software on the disk that needs to recover data, so as not to cause data overwriting. In addition, after the file is lost, please do not save new data to the same disk partition, so as not to damage or completely lose the lost file.
how to recover photos from sd card select the function fast partition scan in renee undeleter
Step 2: Next, select the partition where the lost data is located and click on Next.
scan disk with Renee Undeleter
Step 3: Select the Fast Scan option and click the Next button to scan.
Tips: The quick scan mode only scans the first 30GB of the remaining space of the selected disk. If the desired file is not found after scanning, you can use the deep scan mode to try to scan the hard disk partition again. It will take more time, but more data can be scanned.
select fast scan mode in renee undeleter
Step 4: Wait for the scan to complete, you can double-click the file to preview, then check the file to be recovered, click the Recover button to restore the file to another disk.
select the target files to recover in fast partition scan