As I was driving in to the office today, I could not help but think of my wife’s cleaning efforts at home yesterday. She decided the holiday was a good time to remove the clutter from our kitchen cabinets and drawers. That inspired me this morning to do the same and hopefully put a smile on my storage guys’ faces, at least until I add my new clusters in a couple of weeks and requests some more terabyte LUNs.

A fresh new year is a good time to go through your SQL servers and look for ancient backups that maybe got moved to a different location and escaped the cycle of retention, prehistoric MDFs and LDFs from failed migrations or temporary restorations to different servers. I know I had MDFs and LDFs from databases that were migrated to other servers that were left on the previous server as an insurance policy during the migration. After a month, I think it is safe to remove these and clean the clutter.

This can also be a good time to review your retention policies on your back up jobs and maintenance plans to make sure you are in compliance with your department’s requirements.

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