I have a legacy database whose nightmarish lack of design I will not get into here, but the files on the server are (relatively) enormous. I have:
MyDatabase.mdf: 24.8GB
MyDatabase.ldf: 114.6GB
This database is backed up to a .bak file every night and shipped over to our reporting server, where it's restored. The .bak file is much smaller at only 1.8GB.
However, when I try to restore it on the reporting server, it fails due to insufficient space. There are around 100GB free on the server, and it's trying to eat up the entire 139.4GB that the files consumed on the original server. Unless my knowledge of compression is horrifically wrong, I'm fairly confident that the 1.8GB file is not actually expanding by 7400%.
My Question: Is there any way to tell SQL Server to restore this backup file without reserving that space upfront? I do not care about any of the logs; I just need the data to be there. I understand databases from the development and schema perspective, but I am by no means any sort of DBA.
This is on SQL Server 2008 R2. Thanks for any help or suggestions.