If you do not need—or do not want to deploy—certain updates to your network ever, you need to manually select and decline updates. Declining updates for the sake of managing what you see in the update views is NOT the way to manage WSUS. You should scope your views instead to only show those updates that are needed by client systems. Should you need to decline certain updates, this can be done by going into the administrative console, choosing your update view and in the list, select the updates to decline, right-click on them and choose Decline. You will need to click Yes on the confirmation message to complete the action.
It’s important to note that even though you decline updates, they will still use server resources and should be removed from the database, reducing the number of updates WSUS has to manage. Failing to remove declined updates can fill up the database and cause slowdowns and errors.
To easily manage and clear declined updates, download and install WAM (WSUS Automated Maintenance), a software solution created by Adam J. Marshall. With this innovative program, you can easily shrink the WSUS Content folder’s size by automatically declining multiple types of updates including superseded updates, preview updates and expired updates. Without WAM, you’ll need to manually search for superseded updates, as there is no feature in WSUS that automatically declines them upon approval of a newer update.
WAM is available as a yearly license through AJ Tek. Licenses are extremely affordable, starting at only $90 USD a year for a single/upstream license.
Purchase WAM online and save time and server space!
WSUS Automated Maintenance (WAM) system was developed by AJ Tek and is used by system administrators worldwide—from Australia to Antarctica. With over 50,000 unique downloads, it’s the preferred method of WSUS maintenance worldwide.
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“AJ Tek’s WSUS Automated Maintenance has significantly decreased the data footprint of our WSUS server and is keeping it that way on a daily basis. Where we used to have continuous issues with uncontrollable database growth, failing reporting services and slow performance even with fresh installs of WSUS, these issues are now completely fixed.”
- Paul van Dam, Systems Administrator
Peinemann Corporate Services, The Netherlands
