Problem:
You’ve run out of space on your server and you find out that the WSUS Content Folder is full and it’s eating up space. The WSUS is Windows idea of a centralized update service. In theory, it downloads all the updates for your environment and then distributes them. It does not do a good job of cleaning itself up (consider the manual wizard cleanup) and it comes preconfigured to download the updates for all Windows products, not just the ones you need. As well, when you run the Cleanup Wizard, the console crashes.
Solution:
Stage 1:
1. Open up WSUS Console
2. Go to options and only select the updates for the products you need
Stage 2:
(h/t Gerry Borger albeit a condensed version)
How to Do a Reset:
Note: You may want to execute the procedure below during off hours as your WSUS server will be downloading quite a bit of data.
1. Close any open WSUS consoles.
2. Go to Administrative Tools – Services and STOP the Update Services service.
3. In Windows Explorer browse to the WSUSContent folder (typically D:\WSUS\WSUSContent or C:\WSUS\WSUSContent)
4. Delete ALL the files and folders in the WSUSContent folder.
5. Go to Administrative Tools – Services and START the Update Services service.
6. Open a command prompt and navigate to the folder: C:\Program Files\Update Services\Tools.
7. Run the command WSUSUtil.exe RESET
-This command tells WSUS to check each update in the database, and verify that the content is present in the WSUSContent folder. As it finds that the content is not present in the folder, it executes a BITS job to download the content from Microsoft. This process takes quite a bit of time and runs in the background.