Moving WSUS files to another drive is sometimes necessary, specially when you do not anticipate the amount of space it can occupy from the start. WSUS update files can take an incredible amount of space and if you are performing a new installation and are not familiar with it, you might underestimate this space. Unfortunately, WSUS does not tell you in advance how much space you need depending on the files you select; you will only know when your hard drive fills up.  Now, you can always remove WSUS and reinstall it again, however, you would have to download all your files again which, depending on your bandwidth, can take many hours, even days. This article will teach you how to move all of the WSUS update files to another drive.

 

Instructions

Note: This article does not include moving the WSUS database. Moving the WSUS database involves additional steps and it is not really necessary since the space it takes is negligible compared to the space taken by the WSUS update files.

1) Click on “Start“, “Run“,type “cmd” to open a command prompt window and press enter.

2) Enter the “c:\program files\update services\tools” directory.

3) Use the following command to move all the WSUS files.

wsusutil.exe movecontent %content path% %logfile% –skipcopy

%content path% means the destination path where you are going to move your files to. WSUS already knows where your source files are, so you do not need to specify this on the command line, only the destination path. Example: If the destination of your files is going to be a directory called WSUS in drive d:\, then replace %content path% by d:\wsus. You must create this directory before executing the command, the command will not create it for you.

%logfile% means the location and name of the log file WSUS will create to record everything that happens during the transfer. You can place this log file wherever you like, since this is just to help you record errors in case something goes wrong during the transfer. it can be for example d:\file-transfer.log or d:\wsus\file-trasfer.log.

-skipcopy is optional and enables you to change the storage location without copying the actual files.

 

Final Thoughts

WSUS 3.0 introduces some improvements over its predecessors. This is one of those improvements. Before the “wsusutil.exe movecontent” command, everything had to be done manually, and even after transferring the files it was difficult to make WSUS work again due to the complexity of the IIS permissions. This command is definitely a great improvement that will make your life a lot easier when you are surprised by a full hard drive.