Backup Central

I'm using Arcserve 12 with the local SQL 2005 database. We keep having a problem with the aslog_dat.dat file growing to over 4gb. This is casing the DB to exceed it's 4GB limit. Auto Prune is set to run every day, and prune every thing older than 14 days.

How do i keep the DB from growing so large so fast? How do i shrink the DB back down to below the 4GB limit? I'm also getting the following two errors in my system event log

*Could not allocate space for object 'dbo.aslogw'.IX_aslogw_0' in database 'aslog' because the 'PRIMARY' filegroup is full.

*CREATE DATABASE or ALTER DATABASE failed because teh resulting cumulative database size would exceed your licensed limit of 4096 MB per database


HELP.
Oh and Arcserve customer support is not helping much

Since you talk about the 4 GB limit, I assume you are using SQL Express 2005 as ARCserve database. Coming to the possible workarounds for your problem:
How important are the logs for you? Do you want to retain them for upto 14 days? If no, reduce the number of days to retain the activity logs to 7 days and see if that solves the problem

If the Database protection job runs daily on your ARCserve server, then you can restore the old logs at any point of time (if you need to look at them for some reason)

The other thing is you may want to check is what is causing the large number of logs to be generated on a daily basis:
a) Do you run your backups with ‘Log all activity’ enabled?
b) Do you run too many backup jobs? If yes, try consolidating the number of backup jobs to a smaller count (including more backup machines per job)
c) You may want to try running your backups with ‘Log disabled’ backup option. This would not generate any job log, but you can still see your backup status in activity log.
d) You may try manually running the ca_log command (located in ARCserve home directory) to purge the logs. Try below on command line and you can find the syntax:
ca_log -examples
This will purge the activity log records older than 4 days
You can schedule to run the above command through ARCserve job scheduler

Hope this helps!

We are indeed using SQL Express. We figured out a solution, if you want to call it that. We ended up deleting the entire DB, then reseting all the logging settings, plus had to set up all the media pools and their settings. Once that was all done, we fired off all of our weekly backups and its been running smooth for almost two weeks. The DB size, thanks to the Daily DB Pruning, has stayed in the 1GB area since then

Another option is to enable Catalog DB so only the session summary data is maintained in the database and the details are kept in a catalog file on disk and merged automatically on demand.