There is a good article from Microsoft on keeping it as small as possible: Breaking News! Reduce the size of the WinSxS Directory and Free up Disk Space with a New Update for ...
And an article that dispels some myths about winsxs, it isnt as big as most tools report including dir and explorer. Disk Space - Engineering Windows 7 - Site Home - MSDN Blogs
Our sizes are comparable at 35, 10, and 11 GB respectively.
I suppose you could delete all files in winsxs that dont have a hard link to them and potentially save a few GB.
After starting to try this I learned that there are not many live linux distros that support getfattr with ntfs-3g. (the latest gparted and clonezilla did not, knoppix did)
Tuxera | Junction Points and Symbolic Links - Tuxera
http://www.tuxera.com/community/ntfs-3g-advanced/extended-attributes/
http://blogs.technet.com/b/askcore/archive/2013/03/24/alternate-data-streams-in-ntfs.aspx
This might be good vmware fling tool, something that would index all the files on c: and find out their hard and soft links and delete any from c:\windows\winsxs that dont correspond.
sudo su
mkdir /media/ntfs
ntfs-3g -o streams_interface=xattr /dev/sda2 /media/ntfs
getfattr -n ntfs.streams.list filename
getfattr -h -e hex -n system.ntfs_reparse_data filename
I used the following csv to determine that if I deleted all the files that did not have shared hardlinks, I would gain 4.9 GB Do I really need 35 copies of mshtml.dll taking up 776 MB?
#find /media/sda2/Windows/winsxs -type f -print0 | xargs -0 stat -c %h,%n,%s > //media/sda2/winsxdhardlinks.csv
in winsxs
for each file
if stat -c %h file is 1
rm file
ls -i filename 'this will give the inode number
stat filename 'this will report how many files link to the inode
From a windows command prompt, to find hardlinks for a file, you can use: fsutil hardlink list filename
and for other links, use: fsutil reparsepoint query filename
or: dir /AL *.*
I think if you maintained two snapshots for each golden image, one could have %windir%\Installer deleted and your pool could be based on it, saving 21.3 GB. I did this by mounting the windows partition from a live cd.
Doing any of this on a linked clone isnt going to accomplish much though because there is only one copy of that data in the replica.
