Deleting or Moving Files on Portal Machine C Drive

[a_bakiera]

Hello. I recently deployed Portal 11.1 on a machine. The machine had about 100 GB of disc space on the C drive which I thought would be more than enough. I haven't published many items or created many apps yet and the machine is already down to about 25 GB of space. We are not in production yet so I'm wondering a few things.

1. Am I going to need more than 25GB of space going forward? It's hard for me to say exactly how many more items I need to publish and how many applications I will need to build as we are still very early in this process. I understand this will probably need to be figured out before this question can be answered. Is there a guide somewhere that shows how much space files and applications take up when published?

2. Is there a list or does someone know from experience which files can be deleted and which absolutely can not? I know you can move your data store from the C drive to another drive but that isn't taking up a ton of space. See screenshot below. 

It seems like those top 3 folders have the most space taken up so I'm wondering if there are some files that I can delete or move to another drive to free up more space.

3. Am I better of just re-deploying the Portal on a  different drive? And if so, is there a way to do this or do I have to uninstall everything and start the deployment process from scratch?

Thank you!

[Laura]

25 GB is not a lot. You will need more than that if you ever use the gisdr tool to get a backup of your environment. Check your recycle bin and make sure that is emptied, can make a difference. We keep 100 GB + on our C drive. I oddly enough have all of datastore and portal files installed on the E drive rather than the C drive and have not had an issue doing so in the last 4 years. This is where I am at for the moment:

If I right click my argisportal folder it tells me the size is 233 GB. I do have 60+ members and 804 items stored between layers, applications, etc. 

I would reach out to IT and see if they can weed out anything in the other folders listed. I have mine do that a few times a year. 

[a_bakiera]

Thank you for sharing! Is it possible to make backups on a different drive than what it's deployed on? I have 235 GB free on my D drive.

[Laura]

I believe you can change the output of the backup to any folder. I had to run a few times due to space issues at first. There will be temp files that take up a lot of space though.

 https://enterprise.arcgis.com/en/portal/latest/administer/windows/create-web-gis-backup.htm

• The backup for each component is placed in a temporary directory on each component's machine before being moved to the shared directory you specify. Therefore, ensure that the following directories are large enough to contain the backup of each component:
  • The backup for Portal for ArcGIS will be placed in <Portal_content_directory>\temp. This location should have around 100 percent of the current size of the arcgisportal directory.
  • The backup for ArcGIS Server will be placed in the service account's local TEMP directory, by default in C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Temp. This location should have around 166 percent of the current size of the arcgisserver directory.
  • The backup for ArcGIS Data Store will be placed in <ArcGIS_Data_Store_directory>\temp. This location should have around 62 percent of the current size of the arcgisdatastore directory.

[TonyContreras_Frisco_TX]

From here on out, most of the file increase will be in the arcgis portal and arcgisdatastore folders. That is where new content and service data are stored. The Program Files are fairly static, but they do store some logs and configs, plus all the built-in webapps and runtimes. It will be necessary to monitor disk space on whatever drives are used by the software and OS to make sure the system continues to function. 

As Laura said, you can configure where backups are stored as well as the temp file for that process. Keep in mind that the greater the time (and changes in the Portal) between full backups, the larger the size of any incremental backups and I believe some files in the two folders mentioned above. When the next full backup occurs, the file sizes should back down.

You might be able to clear some space in the Users folder. your extracted Installers are probably saved there as well as the parent files downloaded from esri.

If this is on a Virtual Machine, and there are hardware resources available the C: drive size might be able to be increased. Otherwise, it might be a good idea to change the Portal Content directory to the other drive.