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.  Let’s all clean house and start the year off right!  Enjoy!