Troubleshooting an ever growing Usrvol_sftfs.pkg file

I was reviewing some of the SoftGrid Microsoft Application Virtualization issues that came in over the past couple weeks I found a good one that was worked by Paul Freitas, one of our Support Engineers out in Boston.  This is a troubleshooting tip that should apply to any scenario in which you notice that your usrvol_sftfs.pkg file keeps growing and growing and you want to figure out why.

========

Issue: Over time you may notice that the usrvol_sftfs.pkg file keeps growing.

Cause: The application you virtualized is creating and storing data within the user package.

Resolution: The first thing you need to do is figure out which application is creating this excess data.  If you're virtualizing a single application then this is easy, but if you're working with a suite of apps then it can be a little more difficult.  In a case like this, a good way to identify the offending app is to modify the OSD so that it uses a prelaunch script that opens a CMD prompt window so we can do some checking.  There's an example of how to do that here but I also included the script example below:

SCRIPT TIMEOUT="0" TIMING="PRE" EVENT="LAUNCH" WAIT="TRUE" PROTECT="TRUE">
<SCRIPTBODY>%systemroot%\system32\cmd.exe</SCRIPTBODY>
</SCRIPT>

Once you modify the OSD file, launch the application.  Prior to the application actually starting you should see a CMD Prompt window open.  From the open CMD Prompt window run a DIR command similar to the following so that we can view a list of files within the virtual package:

Q:\AppInstallDir> "DIR /s > C:\Windows\Temp\virtdrive.txt"

In the example above, AppInstallDir is the directory on the virtual Q drive where the offending application is installed and all we're doing is piping the output of our DIR command to a text file named virtdrive.txt on the C drive so we can look at it later.

Once you have your virtdrive.txt file, search it for any files that were recently modified.  In Paul's case he found that the recently modified file was ARCHIVE.PST which told him that Outlook was auto-archiving old email to this file and that's why the package kept growing in size. The resolution here was to specify a different location for the archived data using this KB article, although your exact resolution will ultimately depend on the app you find creating the data.

This isn't an issue isolated to Outlook so if you run into any issue where you find the usrvol_sftfs.pkg growing in size over time you can use the same procedure to figure out why.

Hope this helps!

J.C. Hornbeck | Manageability Knowledge Engineer