How Can I Restore a Database to Different Files and ...............

Hi,

I have a database that over time has become spread over different files, file groups all of various sizes.

I want to restore this database to a different set of files/filegroups and evenly spread.

It appears that I can only resotore a database to number/of and size of files from which it was backed up..

I want to redistribute a 40GB file, using EMPTY is taking for ever and then eventually fails.

What can I do?

Thanks for your help

Try adding several new data files, then doing a shrink-empty on the big file to get it to be spread out to the new files. If the big data file is your primary data file, that will not work.

Suggestion two is to Rebuild the clustered index for several of your larger tables into the new files. This will move the data.