We have a SQL Server 2000 instance where the
MSDB has grown to a huge size due to the backup history never having been deleted in several years. I would like to purge the backup history completely (I don't see why it's needed) and free up the disk space used by all this data.
I realise you can use the
sp_delete_backuphistory command, but this is far too slow (nothing happens in 2+ hours) and while it's executing the transaction log file grows to fill the entire disk (several GB). SQL Server 2000 does not appear to support doing this database by database.
I need to find a way of deleting all the data which doesn't fill the disk up first. So either deleting in stages so the log doesn't grow to big, or perhaps using truncate table somehow, but I'm not sure if there's a safe way to do this, and as I'm not a SQL expert, I wouldn't really know how to do this without destroying my
Any help would be appreciated!