Deleting arcgisoutput SD files

[JonathanDandois]

Doing some Enterprise server maintenance and I noticed that the "\arcgisserver\Directories\arcgisoutput" has about 20GB of SD files in spanning back several years. Are these just created in the process of creating map/feature/hosted services and can they be deleted to reclaim this disk space? I understand these are just 7Zip zip files and I can see to what they refer.  Inspecting some of these, i can see that most are for services that are no longer running in Server / Portal, and I'm "pretty sure"' that the SD files are just temporary in Portal as part of publishing, but I wanted to check first before deleting. 

[jcarlson · Accepted solution]

Happens to us a bunch. Check out this page:

https://enterprise.arcgis.com/en/server/latest/administer/windows/about-server-directories.htm#ESRI_...

The output folder shouldn't have anything older than 10 minutes, but sometimes things seem to get stuck in there. Especially if you've confirmed that the services are no longer in your Portal, reclaim the space and dump these files.

If you're nervous, just take a backup first, but we've never needed to recover these files after the fact.

[JonathanDandois]

Thanks for the sanity check @jcarlson. I dumped all these files in our DEV environment and things are working just fine, will move forward with cleaning this up and adding this to my maintenance checklist.  

[JonathanDandois]

Just a follow up, don't delete everything in the `arcgisoutput` folder! lol. Even though this says "Output directories are for temporary files needed by the server." https://enterprise.arcgis.com/en/server/latest/administer/windows/about-server-directories.htm

Server will throw Warnings like "Physical output directory is not accessible." for existing services if their folders are gone, and more importantly there are multiple critical folders there for System and Utilities for caching, printing, publishing, etc. lol.  So for the context of this ticket, only focus on those large old SD files! whoops!