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It’s always a good idea to run regular maintenance tasks like Disk Cleanup on your Windows machine to help keep it running smoothly. Today we take a look at how to schedule a basic Disk Cleanup task, and how to use command line switches for a more advanced setup.

Schedule Disk Cleanup Basic

Windows includes some handy tools to help keep your machine operating smoothly. One such tool is Disk Cleanup that can remove temp and old files to help you reclaim some hard drive space. You might want to set it up to run weekly or monthly depending on what works best for you. To schedule Disk Cleanup to run on a regular basis we need to schedule a task. For this example we’re using Windows 7, but the steps are essentially the same in Vista as well.

Click on the Start Menu and enter task scheduler into the search box and hit Enter.

The Task Scheduler opens and you’ll want to click on Action then select Create Basic Task.

The Create Basic Task Wizard comes up and from here type in a name for the task and a description then click Next.

Now select how often you want Disk Cleanup to run…Weekly, Daily, Monthly, One Time…etc. There is not right or wrong answer to how often you run it. It’s completely up to you and you might want to try out some different schedules. In this example we’re going to select weekly.

Since we set it up to run weekly we need to schedule it when to start, how often it reoccurs, and which day of the week to run it.

Next under Action select Start a program…

In the Program/script field type in cleanmgr.exe

Or you can hit browse and select Disk Cleanup which is in C:\Windows|system32\cleanmgr.exe

Under Program/script you’ll see the path to Disk Cleanup as C:\Windows\system32\cleanmgr.exe

Then you’re shown a summary of the scheduled task and if everything looks correct click on Finish.

For this basic setting we scheduled it for a time when we know the computer will be in use. When it’s time for the Scheduled Task to occur it will pop up and you can run it by selecting the drive to clean up.

Disk Cleanup starts its calculations…

Now the results and you can choose the files to delete.

Advanced Command Line Switches

While the above method is effective, you may not want to interact with the Disk Cleanup utility at all. Running a couple of command line switches will allow you to select what to have cleaned up and run everything automatically. To open the Command Prompt type cmd into the search box in the Start Menu and hit Enter.

With the Command Prompt open type in the following:

cleanmgr.exe /sageset:1

That will open the Disk Cleanup Settings dialog box where you can select the items you want Disk Cleanup to delete. You’ll notice there are a lot more options here than when you go through the GUI to cleanup files.

After selecting the files you want to be deleted in Disk Cleanup Settings click Ok to close out of the screen. The /sageset:1 command creates a registry key that saves the settings you entered.

Now go in and create your Scheduled Task like we showed previously, but this time you’ll want to add in /sagerun:1 into the Add argument field.

Now when Disk Cleanup runs it’ll retrieve those saved settings you created with /sageset:1 and you won’t need to interact with Disk Cleanup at all. It will run automatically and clean up the files you selected in Disk cleanup Settings.

Task Scheduler Error

When you launch Task Manager in Windows 7 you might get the following error message. It tells you to hit refresh but the error keeps coming back. It doesn’t seem to negatively affect anything you schedule, but it’s quite annoying.

From the research I’ve done on this error, there are a handful of different solutions that have worked for different people. On our system, the Disk Defrag Schedule was turned off, so we turned it back on and resolved the issue. On a separate Windows 7 system the Disk Defrag Schedule was already on (which it is by default) and turning it off cured the error. On another machine I had to turn it off then back on to fix the error message.

Since this “rub your head and pat your belly” approach worked we didn’t try any other possible fixes. If you find it doesn’t work or have found another solution let us know in the comments.

Conclusion

If you use the advanced switches to run Disk Cleanup it actually offers a lot more choices. In the /sageset:1 switch, “1” is just an arbitrary number. You can enter any number you want, but make sure /sagerun:”x” corresponds to the number you used in /sageset:”x”. So you can customize the switches for different types of files you want to clean in Disk Cleanup Settings.

For example, maybe you only want to clean Temp Internet files during a cleanup session, then you could do /sageset:1 and /sagerun:1 for that. Then if you want to clean up all files you could use /sageset:10 and /sagerun:10 for that. The switches give you more flexibility in the types of files that are deleted during the Disk Cleanup session. Whichever method you use, or if you just want to run it manually, running Disk Cleanup will keep your drive free of unwanted files.

One of the cool features of Windows Home Server is being able to set backups of the other computers on your network to the server. Today we take a look at the process of configuring a computer on your network to be backed up automatically to WHS.

Backup to WHS

To backup a computer your network, open the Windows Home Server Console and select Computers & Backup. Right-click the computer to backup and select Configure Backup.

The Backup Configuration Wizard kicks off…

Wait while the Configuration Wizard collects information…

Choose the disks you want to backup…notice you can also choose external drives if you wish to back them up. Note that the disk needs to be formatted as NTFS, if it’s not then it won’t be displayed in the list.

Now choose the folders you want to exclude from the backup. The grayed out locations are automatically excluded but you may want to remove them from the exclude list. If you want to exclude other folders click on the Add button.

Now go through and select the folders to exclude from the backup. To reduce the size of your backups, you might exclude large media files and unimportant documents, pictures…etc. Make sure you don’t exclude your most important documents, pictures, and other data.

After you’re done excluding folders from the backup, click Next to continue.

Then you’ll have the Congratulations screen showing a summary of the backup size, the time of day backups will occur, and the backup frequency which is daily.

After the backup process completes you’ll be able to see if a computer has been backed up or not in WHS Console.

If you want to change the time of day backups occur, click on Settings in WHS Console then Backup. Under Backup Time you can change the start and end time to what fits your schedule.

To view a backup just right-click on the computer and select View Backups.

It opens the View Backups window where you can verify and manage your computer’s backups.

Conclusion

This will get you started with backups and you’ll have peace of mind knowing that your computer’s data is being backed up to the server. The process is relatively simple and the main thing is to make sure the backups aren’t needlessly large with unnecessary files (such as large multimedia files). There’s a lot more administration you can do with backups, and we’ll be taking a detailed look at managing them in future posts…so stay tuned. Remember that you can download a free 30 day trial of Windows Home Server, so if you have an extra machine you can dedicate to being a server, you might want to check it out.

Download the 30 Day Trial of Windows Home Server

Sometimes you might find it necessary to add additional storage to your Windows Home Server. Today we’ll take a look at how to add an external hard drive to your home server to increase storage space.

Add External Drive

Plug the external hard drive into the server. Then open up the Windows Home Server Console from another computer on the network and go to Server Storage. You should see the external drive in the list, where in this example it’s a Western Digital 1TB My Book. You’ll notice the drive status is Not Added yet.

To add the new drive as storage space, right-click and select Add.

The Add a Hard Drive Wizard kicks off.

In the next step of the wizard we want to select Add this hard drive to your server storage to increase the storage capacity of your home server. If you were adding it as a backup drive for the server you’d select the second option.

A warning screen will come up advising you that the drive will be formatted and all data lost, just click Finish to start the process.

Wait a few moments while the drive is formatted and prepared for the server.

That’s it! Now you have the extra storage space available to store more movies, music, video, and important data files.

Now you’ll see the drive listed with a Healthy status and there is more server storage space in the graphic too.

If you need additional storage space on your Windows Home Server, adding an additional external drive might be a simpler process than cracking open the case and adding an internal one (depending on the machine your running it on). So far while we’ve been testing it, there doesn’t seem to any latency problems while accessing files from the server. In the near future we will show you how to add an internal drive as well, and try to see compare them to see if there is a difference in performance. If you’re interested in trying out Windows Home Server they offer a free 30 day trial and we have an article up on how to set it up which you can read as well.

Download the Windows Home Server 30 Trial