Sharepoint logfile is too large

Question

We run an SBS 2008 server with WSS. On the drive I have set aside for WSS, I'm fast running out of space due to the ShareWebDb_log.ldf file being >96GB!

File size is huge compared to the actual sharepoint site (15 GB)

I've tried doing to do what I've read online - change the recovery mode, backup and truncate - but I can't actually see how I do this via the SQL Server Management Studio tool. Can anyone shed any light?

ShareWebDb_log.ldf is not listed in the databases tree node so I can see no way to do this.

Answer 1

Until you perform a backup of the database log file, SQL Server will keep the log file around so that it could perform a point in time recovery if you asked for it.

Are you taking log backups?

The company I work for makes a backup product called SQL Backup Pro that provides a decent GUI for taking backups (amongst other things), it might be useful, even if you just use the trial version to get a log backup done.

Once you have taken a log backup, you can shrink the log file on disk from SSMS:

• Right click on the database
• Choose Tasks -> Shrink -> Files
• Select the Log File type

It relates to SQL Server 2000, but this description of the process by Microsoft is quite good.