SBS 2008 disk space and the DataServiceComponents.log file

I was doing some house keeping on a SBS 2008 server and was trying to free up some disk space on C:\, I usually like to keep 20-30GB free on it.

There is a really good Technet blog post (http://blogs.technet.com/b/sbs/archive/2010/03/02/recovering-disk-space-on-the-c-drive-in-small-business-server-2008.aspx), which gives a good overview of some of the areas where we can reclaim diskspace from. 

These include SBS Logs, IIS Logs, Badmail directory, and a couple of wizards, the WSUS Cleanup Wizard, and the Move Data Wizards.

One of the first things we do with a new SBS server is move the data and WSUS off of the C:\ so this generally leaves logs and Badmail. For example, I was amazed to see taht my DataServiceComponents.log (located in C:\Program Files\Windows Small Business Server\Logs\MonitoringServiceLogs) was nearly 3.5GB in size, not only is it huge but for a text based log file it would be a nightmare to use. 

SBS 2008 logs an awful lot of data to this file, so you don’t want to just delete it in case you need to reference it in future for troubleshooting. On this server, I sent it to an archive folder, the size reduced to nearly 100MB. 

In order to compress it, you have to stop the Windows SBS Manager Service first, so you can archive and delete the log file. When you start the Windows SBS Manager Service a new DataServiceComponents.log file will be created.