delete SASHome and SAS Software Depot folders in Windows7

[Chang]

hi,

Two folders "SASHome" and "SAS Software Depot" appear everytime you install SAS. They are still there taking disk space even when you uninstall older version SAS. I was wondering if it would be a good idea to maunally delete these two folders from the older installation? Here is a summary of the disk space taken by SASHome and SAS Software Depot in my laptop

folderName                                        Disk space   

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

SAS Software Depot (9.3 Chang)     12.2GB
SAS Software Depot (9.3 MQ)          8.12GB
SAS Software Depot (Chang)          11.2GB
SAS 9.4 Software Depot                   20.4GB

SAS 9.4 Home                                  9.88GB
SASHome                                         382MB

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks

[Mark_sas]

SAS Software Depot is a directory structure from which you install SAS software.  You download your order(s) to it using the SAS Download Manager.  It is safe to delete the depot after you're done installing SAS software.  There are no runtime requirements for the depot by SAS products, but if you intend to download future orders, you can end up saving space by leaving the depot around, and downloading the new orders into it.  The depot maintains a single copy of any given software deliverable, so if your orders have overlap in deliverable content, only one copy is maintained.

SASHome is the installation directory which maintains all the binaries used by SAS at runtime.  This is obviously necessary for any SAS products you continue to run.  If you uninstall all SAS software from your system, you can safely delete this folder as well (there are times when the uninstall routine is unable to delete all files when it's executing).  However, take note that different versions of SAS products can be installed into the same SASHome directory.  As such, unless you have uninstalled *all* versions of all SAS products on your system, you could be undercutting software you still intend to run by deleting the entire SASHome directory.

[Chang]

hi Mark,

thanks for the reply. I am currenlty using SAS 9.4 in Windows7. When this version was installed, I specified a directory named by myself (SAS9.4Home) other than the default directory SASHome. I suppose all the SAS products are installed in the SAS9.4Home. It should be safe to delete SASHome?

Cheers,

Chang

[Mark_sas]

Yes.  As with any updates though, I would advise you to make a backup of the SASHOME directory before deleting it.

[jakarman]

The renaming of the SASHOME to a dedicated name is not bad. It is the adviced approach to have multiple installations/versions on a machine. (peaceful coexistance). http://support.sas.com/rnd/migration/planning/software/bi.html

Not that relevant on desktops but wiht server based migrations that could a very sensible option. It avoids a Data migration on the same moment as an softwaremigration. Making it into smaller task in the product life cycle.