[sims] Shrink 240gb Linked Documents Server

[bravebirdie]

Hi everyone, we are a large school with 2000+ students and 20 years of old sims data still on our servers, we are running into some performance issues with sims and wondering if people can steer me in the right direction. As far as I am aware having more RAM in the system than the main database is advisable we have 48GB of RAM and our database is only 30gb however our linked documents server is over 240gb! Is there a feasible way to reduce this without the entire SQL becoming a nonsensical mess because it cant find things anymore. We haven't run the re indexing patch for a while and as far as I am aware we have never run the housekeeping for orphaned documents either or the address tidy and merge routines.

 

I'm not looking to delete it all mainly archive it so its not part of the actively loaded document server.

 

Any help or advice is appreciated

[bobsmith]

that's huge!

 

Bromcom only gives you 10Gb of storage for documents! (you can pay for more)

 

check your retention policy - but I'd bet that you can get rid of a LOT of that.

 

In the short term - archive all the oldest files to a network share - simply removing them from the DMS in the process.

[mthomas08]

We had the same problem and after pushing quite a lot of work by the data manager and a few others... they saved..... about 5%.

 

Our doc storage was pretty big.. I think about 200GB or so. It was the large PDFs that took the most.. some were like 30MB each... and 100 of them... bam 3GB.

 

At the top of mmy head I think it was all manual labour work.. but is there a doc link checker within SIMs? I think there is? The ability to check which docs have been unlinked, take a backup and then delete those docs. I'm sure within SIMs there is a bunch of options available to archive/clear some stuff.

[BKGarry]

I would say delete orphaned documents, but also look at the Deleting old students and unlinked guardians/contacts routines, Do these in small batches as it will go crazy. but you should not need to keep the information of most students over 25 years old (30 years if they have an SEND or LAC I think) - double check the retention toolkit available for them.

 

Once you get rid of those students, you can then look at the orphaned documents etc.

 

Sorry I cannot give you the exact menu routine, as we no longer have a SIMS license so cannot access this.

[mikes]

yeah we are doing a data cleanse, our LEA moving to arbor - I don't know what the original docstoragesize was - but I have a crude secondary backup (just does a robocopy over the top every night onto a bitlockered HDD) - that robocopied SIMSDOCSTORAGE is ~120GB in size

 

after we did our data cleanse - deleting students older than 31 and deleting their associated contacts - our actual simsdocstorage now seems to be about 30GB. I'm not sure if our docstorage was actually 120gb in size before because of the way the backup works (it's a crude secondary backup just in case so if folders get renamed there'd be duplicates) but our SIMS HDD does have a lot more space now.

[bravebirdie]

Thank you, whats the best way to do this archive? im not super familiar with SIMS so any advice or a linked guide would be appreciated.