Our SharePoint (WSS 3.0) databases are on a SQL-2000 server that's starting to get low on disk space. In order to buy some time to move content into either our MOSS or SP-2010 environment we did some cleanup in SharePoint by archiving & removing several old sites and removing older document versions in a couple of libraries. These changes were made 3 days ago. The Site Settings | Storage Space Allocation page indicates that content size is a little under 37 GB, down from a bit more than 40 GB. (I did make sure that the deleted files / versions were also removed from the site collection recycle bin.) What has us puzzled is that the physical database file on the SQL Server has not gotten smaller and the amount of "free space" that can be reclaimed has actually gone down - it's currently at about 200 MB. The database file size is over 57 GB; 20 GB larger than SharePoint reports. So, I have a few questions: Is it normal for the content database file size to be significantly (50-60%) larger than the amount of content that SharePoint reports? Is it normal for the database not to get smaller (or at least have more internal free space) when a large amount of content is removed? Is there any way that we can recover some of this space to get some breathing room on the SQL Server? Thanks! Mike:o

Hello Mike, You probably need to run maintainance on your SQL databases. You need to Shrik database both MDF and Log file which will actually free up the disk space occupied. Hoe this helps!Cheers! Dilip

We've done that. The DBA just went into the management console to shrink them it's showing < 200MB of recoverable space - much less than the 3GB we removed or the 20GB beyond what SharePoint says it has for content. The way I understand it, once that space is used, the database file will grow again... Is there a delay in SharePoint for removing deleted content from the database? Is there a way to force that to happen? Thanks again... Mike:o

Hi, Are the Transaction logs being backed up? If not then back them up and shrink database again. hth,Chirag Patel, MCTS Blog: techChirag.com Twitter: @techChirag

Yes, the transaction logs are being backed up. Mike:o

Doh! So, I'd been deleting things from the recycle bin and watching the site collection content size versus quota, but the stage 2 recycle bin was set to "50% of quota" and no time limit on retention. There were deleted items in there that went back 3 years! I set the autodeletion to 30 days with a cap on size at 25%, then deleted a bunch of old stuff out of of stage 2 and got back over 10 GB. I hope that helps someone else!! Mike:o