I run Sharepoint 2010 on a hyper-v server which I backup each term.

Now these backup images are starting to get pretty huge at about 50gb so I thought I would look into reducing the footprint on the sharepoint server.

http://img3.imageshack.us/img3/5512/foldersharepointfolderi.png

After a bit of googling I came up with these solutions

- Turn off IIS logging

IIS Manager >> sites >> sharepoint >> logging >> do not create log files

Space saving 12gb

- Turn off Usage Health Data

Sharepoint Central admin >> monitoring >> configure usage health data

Space saving 4gb

- Shrink the main database

SQL server manager >> databases >> sharepoint >> tasks >> shrink

space saving 1gb

- Shrink the web analytics database

SQL server manager >> databases >> WebAnalyticsServiceApplication_ReportingDB >> tasks >> shrink

space saving 1gb

So there you have it, My hyper-v image is now "only" 30gb which is reasonable to backup regularly.

Now I need to work out why sharepoint is using 98% of the system memory and 100% jump in cpu every 15mins!!