Great discussion and helpful solutions.

1) many of us are a little too touchy about critiques of our code

2) tell your management how much disk space you need to run sql server and that it's a cost of doing business. Otherwise tell them to use a pencil and notepad to keep track of data. So many posts about shrinking files, "ballooning" log files etc etc. Just buy the danged disk space and suck it up.

3) I don't know if this is a trend, but in our shop backups were turned over to the systems team using Commvault. Any backups done outside of that product could break the log chain. Naturally this severely ties my hands. Also, any change in recovery model will cause Commvault to react according to it's programming, often causing an immediate full backup.

4) You "could" go to simple recovery on a production database, but if the company asks you to restore to a point in time, and you can't do it because you stopped transaction log backups, you might be looking for another job.

I've actually considered changing modes during our weekend maintenance because Commvault can't keep up and it's log backups are now occasionally finishing many hours apart, rather than the scheduled 15 minute interval. But I'm hoping this will give me the ammunition I need to establish weeknight maintenance windows so it's not all done on the weekend.