Sharepoint server quickly losing hard disk space or low hard disk space issues
For those who are finding that their SharePoint server (or at least their SharePoint farm SQL server/s) are running out of disk space quickly, here is a quick trick that you can do with your databases to free up some space.
Note: Although this procedure is fairly safe – Please only try this if you have a reliable backup of the database (and logs) and recovery from your backups has been tested.
- This is an optional step but I like to run a program called SequoiaView just to have a graphical view of what is taking up all the hard disk space on the servers.
With this program you can colour coordinate extensions to filter out your databases and log files as illustrated below:
In the above illustration you can see my databases are fairly large and that’s ok because it’s all my SharePoint data, but my log file is fairly large too. It’s around 1.7GB.
2. Let’s try and shrink this log file to save some space. Open up SQL server Management Studio (If you don’t know what this is you probably shouldn’t be doing this). Navigate to the database which log files you want to shrink. The name of the log is usually the name of the database.
3. Right click on the database and select Properties
4. Then select the options menu on the left hand side of the new window that appears like so:
Above I have highlighted the options selection as well as recovery model. For a full explanation read here but for a brief explanation, this basically tells SQL server to either keep a full track of every transaction made on this database so you can recover specific transactions or a simple recovery which relies on backups taken of the database for recovery.
5. You can choose to modify this value to simple which will get rid of your large log issue or you can temporarily change it to Simple, shrink your log file and then put it back into full recovery mode (which is what I like to do and is the gist of this blog). So change your recovery model to Simple (Please backup the database first) and hit OK.
6. Next right click on the database of topic and select Tasks -> Shrink->Files
7. The window that appears will look like the following but please choose the options as shown in the figure below:
Select Log for file type.
You will notice in the above figure that we can reclaim 98% of space from that log file if we use simple recovery for this database. Keeping it in full recovery mode would still free up space but not nearly as much.
8. Hit OK and then go back and follow steps 3 and 4 to revert your recovery mode back to full.
You should now have more space to work with on your SharePoint SQL server box.
You can also automate this process so that you don’t have to continue to check in and do this manually by creating a maintenance plan in SQL server Management Studio but I’ll let you figure that one out yourself.
9 Responses to “Sharepoint server quickly losing hard disk space or low hard disk space issues”
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I hope latest data saving techniques will overcome it.Thanks for all the graphics showed above.I came to know about its working process.Thanks
The post is very informative and useful for me. Thanks for sharing this post.
well…it is the fantastic but the main programmer is not alive and also very complicative
awesome,The post is very informative and useful for me. Thanks for sharing this post .This post may help for many of the people .
Many of the person asked me about this topic why this problem occur .But i have no knowledge regarding this information .If you have then please share with us.
The post is very informational and useful for me.Thanks for sharing the post.
I have less knowledge about SharePoint servers but I after read here I came to know about its working.I understand through SequoiaView how the log files spacing free the hard disks.
The post is very interesting and useful for me.Thanks for sharing the interesting post.
Many peoples use it for their own purpose and get the full response.