Greetings,
I am experiencing a problem that is appears to be the same as the old thread here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/bee18ffb-f779-4aa4-900d-046e7711424c/sccm-2012-source-content-gets-deleted?forum=configmanagergeneral
Rather than revive an old post, I thought it best to start my own.
We have a rather large environment (CAS +5 Primaries + Many DP's) and we are currently adding several new remote DP's each week. Each time a new DP is added it is placed in a Distribution Group and the "core" package content is sent to it.
I have a problem where my Windows Update Packages keep failing due to content disappearing from the source folder location. This started some time ago, and is now becoming a regular event to correct. Not every day, but once a week or so.
- The Update group has the updates all showing as "downloaded"
- I have a report query that matches the updates to the "GUID" subfolder so I know all the content is there
- I distribute the content from the CAS. Distrmgr.log shows all is good. Packagemgr.log on the Primaries show all is good
- Client have been installing the updates as expected so the deployment does work
Days/weeks later, ALL the DP's will show as "failed" for that update package. Checking the distmgr.log shows that it is failing to distribute due to a missing source folder. I use my query to work out which update that subfolder GUID belongs to, but it is already flagged as downloaded, and when trying to download it again CM just "skips" it thinking it already has the content in that package.
The "fix" is to download the same update to a new package instead. CM then does a proper check, realises it doesn't have the content and will download the update to the new package source location. I can then copy the missing GUID subfolder from the new package into the original package and try the distribution again.
The problem now is that there are usually many folders missing, so distmgr.log will fail again on the next missing folder. Because it stops at the first error, repeating the above process is incredibly tedious when there are a lot of missing folders.
My current "solution" is to select ALL the updates that should be in the current package and download them all to a "Temp package" that isn't deployed or distributed anywhere. Then in future when the main deployment package fails, I just "select all, copy" the contents of the temp folder into the original folder (skip duplicates) and it puts back all the missing content and distribution will work again.
We are not using ADR's for this content, although I do have an ADR for the Endpoint updates which go into a completely different distribution package.
*Something* is cleaning up or purging these folders from the source location, but I have no idea what process or mechanism this might be.
Any thoughts or suggestions most welcome.
Scott.