Disk clean up scripts for Windows

Also, welcome to the community @heimir! Normally people are very helpful here.

It depends on what the goal is. Some can be very finicky, some work right off the bat. That being said, most of the time community members will normally be discussing solutions for problems like this within about 24 hours. I have noticed, sadly, that community discussions overall have dropped off a bit since the pay for AIT debacle started. So I wish you the best of luck for sure!

Is that the Atera Script Library? (Just to make sure I understand correctly.)

For the AIT issue, look at this discussion. It goes over the whole thing from the initial shift through today:

@heimir Almost every script from the shared script library that I have tried does not work. I have asked Atera to monitor this more closely for two years, but it doesn't seem like a priority to them. If they don't know if a script works, they don't know if one is malicious. Also, most of the scripts are probably being made using the built-in ChatGPT, which is basically useless at making working scripts.

In my honest opinion, I am starting to get Kaseya vibes from Atera, which totally sucks. I have enjoyed being a customer of Atera, but in the last 15 months, I have seen them completely ignore actual customer needs to promote features that don't work well "AI." Instead of ensuring their script library is vetted, and every script works, they are going to all these conventions and advertising how amazing their AI is when it doesn't really do anything useful at this time.

A shared script library is useless and dangerous if support tells you they don't know if it works.

They have focused more on the way the product looks than on the way it works. I do enjoy the updated interface, but if your product has tons of issues with functionality, you are going to lose clients. In my opinion, this seems to be the case being so active on the community page and Reddit. And if you are losing demand, you shouldn't raise the price. That is only going to force more clients out the door.

They do campaigns like review us on whatever site and get a $30 gift card. Well, if they pay out for 5000 reviews, that's $150,000 (not saying thats their budget just putting out figures) that could have gone to a developer or two to review the script library and make sure everything on there works.

A good product means a good review for free from clients. You don't need to spend so much on advertising and getting reviews. Spend it on development.

Rant over

I have tried to publish several of my scripts for the last 6 months and they just seem to sit there as "Pending".
Aside from that there is frankly a bunch of trash in there that has no comments and terrible naming. I personally have stopped using what is in there since it's not very reliable and not up to date at all.

Here is what I have been using for disk cleanups on my machines. It's an amalgamation of various things I have found that seemed to work well. It's definitely not perfect and often fails at some point depending on the machine. It always times out, so don't wait around for it to finish
I have commented out some of the more aggressive commands.
Use at your own discretion.

##_Gets total disk space available before cleaning starts

  $diskBefore = (Get-WmiObject Win32_LogicalDisk).FreeSpace | Measure-Object -Sum

  $before = [math]::Round($diskBefore.Sum/1MB,2)

  Write-Host "Starting Disk Usage: $before MB"

##_Disk Cleanup

##_Create reg keys

  if (!(Test-Path("HKLM:SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Temporary Files"))) { New-Item "HKLM:SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Temporary Files" -Force | New-ItemProperty -Name 'LastAccess' -Value '2' -Force | Out-Null; } else { Get-Item "HKLM:SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Temporary Files" | New-ItemProperty -Name 'LastAccess' -Value '2' -Force | Out-Null;}
  $regKeys = @(
	"HKLM:SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Active Setup Temp Folders",
	"HKLM:SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\BranchCache",
	"HKLM:SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Downloaded Program Files",
	"HKLM:SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Internet Cache Files",
	"HKLM:SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Memory Dump Files",
	"HKLM:SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Old ChkDsk Files",
	"HKLM:SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Previous Installations",
	"HKLM:SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Recycle Bin",
	"HKLM:SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\RetailDemo Offline Content",
	"HKLM:SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Service Pack Cleanup",
	"HKLM:SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Setup Log Files",
	"HKLM:SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\System error memory dump files",
	"HKLM:SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\System error minidump files",
	"HKLM:SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Temporary Files",
	"HKLM:SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Temporary Setup Files",
	"HKLM:SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Thumbnail Cache",
	"HKLM:SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Update Cleanup",
	"HKLM:SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Upgrade Discarded Files",
	"HKLM:SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Windows Defender",
	"HKLM:SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Windows Error Reporting Files",
	"HKLM:SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Windows Error Reporting Archive Files",
	"HKLM:SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Windows Error Reporting Queue Files",
	"HKLM:SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Windows Error Reporting System Archive Files",
	"HKLM:SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Windows Error Reporting System Queue Files",
	"HKLM:SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Windows ESD installation files",
	"HKLM:SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Windows Reset Log Files",
	"HKLM:SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Windows Upgrade Log Files")

  foreach($key in $regKeys){
	if (!(Test-Path("$key"))) { New-Item "$key" -Force | New-ItemProperty -Name 'StateFlags0420' -Value '2' -Force | Out-Null; } else { Get-Item "$key" | New-ItemProperty -Name 'StateFlags0420' -Value '2' -Force | Out-Null;}
  }

##_Run Disk Cleanup 
  Start-Process -Wait "$env:SystemRoot\System32\cleanmgr.exe" -ArgumentList "/sagerun:420"
  
##_Purge the Temp folders

  ##Remove-Item -Path $env:TEMP* -Recurse -Force

  ##System Temp

  $systemTempPath = Join-Path -Path $env:windir -ChildPath '\Temp'

  Get-ChildItem -Path $systemTempPath | Where-Object { $.LastWriteTime -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-30) } | Remove-Item -Recurse -Force -Confirm:$false

  ##_User Temp
  $userProfiles = Get-ChildItem -Path C:\Users -Directory
  ##_Iterate through each user profile
  foreach ($userProfile in $userProfiles) {
	$userName = $userProfile.Name
	$tempFolderPath = Join-Path -Path $userProfile.FullName -ChildPath 'AppData\Local\Temp'

	##_Check if the "\AppData\Local\Temp" folder exists for the user
	if (Test-Path -Path $tempFolderPath -PathType Container) {
		##_Cleanup all files in "\AppData\Local\Temp" for the user that are older than 30 days
		Get-ChildItem -Path $tempFolderPath | Where-Object { $_.LastWriteTime -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(-30) } | Remove-Item -Recurse -Force -Confirm:$false
	} else {
		Write-Host "No Temp folder found for $userName."
	}
}

##_Remove junk Windows Apps

  ##_List Packages

    ##_Get-AppxPackage -AllUsers | Select Name, PackageFullName
  get-appxpackage -AllUsers *BingNews* | remove-appxpackage -AllUsers
  get-appxpackage -AllUsers *WindowsMaps* | remove-appxpackage -AllUsers
  get-appxpackage -AllUsers *YourPhone* | remove-appxpackage -AllUsers
  get-appxpackage -AllUsers *xboxapp* | remove-appxpackage -AllUsers
  get-appxpackage -AllUsers *Microsoft.XboxApp* | remove-appxpackage -AllUsers
  get-appxpackage -AllUsers *Microsoft.Xbox.* | remove-appxpackage -AllUsers
  get-appxpackage -AllUsers *XboxGamingOverlay* | remove-appxpackage -AllUsers
  get-appxpackage -AllUsers *XboxIdentityProvider* | remove-appxpackage -AllUsers
  get-appxpackage -AllUsers *XboxSpeechToTextOverlay* | remove-appxpackage -AllUsers
  get-appxpackage -AllUsers *SkypeApp* | remove-appxpackage -AllUsers
  get-appxpackage -AllUsers *XboxOneSmartGlass* | remove-appxpackage -AllUsers
  get-appxpackage -AllUsers Microsoft.windowscommunicationsapps | remove-appxpackage -AllUsers
  get-appxpackage -AllUsers *ZuneMusic* | remove-appxpackage -AllUsers
  get-appxpackage -AllUsers *ZuneVideo* | remove-appxpackage -AllUsers

##_Empty the Recycle Bin

  $driveName = (Get-ChildItem -Path Env:\SystemDrive).Value

  Remove-Item -Path $driveName`$recycle.bin -Recurse -Force -Confirm:$false

##_Clean up system packages (C:\Windows\WinSxS)

  #dism.exe /online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup /ResetBase

##_Gets the available space of all drives after cleaning

  $diskAfter = (Get-WmiObject Win32_LogicalDisk).FreeSpace | Measure-Object -Sum

##_Uses the values from the total disk space used before and after this script to calculate

##_total space saved, then converts it to MBs for easier reading

$after = [math]::Round($diskAfter.Sum/1MB,2)

$saved = [math]::Round(($before - $after),2)

$savedGBs = [math]::Round(($saved * 1024 * 1024 / 1GB),2)

##_If there is less space than before the script started just report back 0

If($saved -gt 0) {

  $saved = 0

}

##_Formats the output so we can split vars

Write-Output "before=$before|after=$after|spaceSaved=$($saved)MBs|spaceSavedGBs=$($savedGBs)GBs"

Write-Host "Ending Disk Usage: $after MB"

Write-Host "Ending Saved: $saved MB"
Exit 0

We use a Tier1 cleanup script that executes automatically when a disk-space alert is breached, this uses mainly Windows' Disk Cleanup tool to perform the bulk of actions, plus some specific safe deletions and some reporting.

The script will typically time-out if run manually giving the "Cannot reach agent" BS but completes when you look into the recent processes page.

I was unable to post the 243 lines of powershell, as it breaks my ability to post :


"Body is 1969 characters too long"
PM me for a copy if required.

I have a Tier2 version that also empties users recycle Bin etc.

Regards the scripting generally, I've never used the Atera Copilot AI for generating a script. I find that the natural flow of conversation within ChatGPT far superior, after the initial script creation, for the ongoing improvements to the script as you run it and then think of someway to fix/make it better.

I'd prefer they binned all their AI approach they are pushing to us and instead focussed on grass-roots improvements, such as allowing better filtering within the scripting page, or the ability to turn OFF the Shared Scripts Library, that takes ~24 seconds to load the /scripts page each time … very annoying.

I'll DM you!