We have hit a pretty major issues with an old WSS 3.0 installation. first, a little background. We are using a WSS 3.0 standalone server to run a large number of sites. It is not a good or recommended setup and is on its last legs. We have a new farm running SP2010 along side it- a properly setup farm with fail-over clustering, powerful hardware, the works. We are actively trying to migrate over from the old WSS 3.0 but are not done yet. Here is our problem. We have run out of disk space and can no longer allocate anymore to the old WSS 3.0 install. So we tried deleting some of the old content and sites that have been moved to the new SP2010 farm. However, this is not freeing up any space. Note that we are deleting things from the end user, site collection, etc recycling bins. However, the database files still stay the same size. Perhaps worse is that the log file continues to grow each time we try to delete anything or shrink the database. Our database size is roughly 550GB, with a log file of roughly 300GB. Even if we delete ~100GB worth of document / sites from the WSS 3.0 setup, nothing is removed from the 550GB. Some notes / questions. We have tried "SHRINKFILE / SHRINKDATABASE" on the WSS_Content Database. This has not worked, at all. We understand we may need to change the "recovery mode" on the database from Full to Simple. However- we are worried about losing incremental backups if doing so. (Any insight here?) We are using SQL Server Management Studio to try to maintain the database. Is this the right approach with a WSS 3.0 standalone installation? We have read through a few white papers from MS and others. We have tried a lot of maintenance procedures to no avail. I think that perhaps the problem is the documents are generally geared towards large farm setups with proper databases. Not those running standalone installs using windows internal databases. Please let me know if you have any advice or if you have ever encountered anything like this. We are getting desperate as our free space approaches 0.

Hello, After deleting the content from everywhere (list/library, both level od recycle bins), minimize the allocated storage quota for the respective site collection from Central administration. Hope this helps, Regards, Rohan --Please mark as "Answer" if the post resolve your issue--

Can you expand on that a bit? How would we know what to reduce the site collection quota to? If we lowered it below what the actual site collection size is, what impact would that have on people working in the site collection? Would this free up space for us? Hoping to get a bit more information.

Hello, Probably I explained that incorrectly. Lets assume you can see the DB file size is 500 GB. There is only one site collection(Web app) in it. Now you have freed up 100 GB space from site (by deleting items from all possible locations) Go to site Actions -> Site settings -> Storage space allocation. It is showing the current storage as 400 GB and allocated is 500 GB. So now you only need to go to Central administration, and reduce the quota for this site to 450 GB. (keeping 50 GB free for site users to utilize) If you lower the quota below the actual data, then the site will practically go into Read only mode. Data would be accessible.. but users cannot perform any operations. Hope this helps, Regards, Rohan --Please mark as "Answer" if the post resolve your issue--

Hi Mike, try reducing the Transaction Log per: http://blogs.technet.com/b/patrick_heyde/archive/2009/04/24/sharepoint-shrink-database.aspx In case you're using SQL 2008 check out the comments. Andrei