I have been reading the forum looking for advice on shrinking database and log files as well. I'd like to post a follow-up question to this thread if I may.

We have a database that is loaded daily with transactions from a core system and the database is then used for reporting. The database's was created several years ago by someone no longer with the company and I have inherited the responsibility for it's maintenance and health.

The .mdf file size is 172 GB. To make matters worse, there are several versions of this same database used for development and testing purposes, so we have four separate databases of this same size to manage. When using the GUI to shrink the database, the screen indicates that there is 88% free space.

Our server admin performs nightly and weekly tape backups of these files for disaster recovery purposes, and frequenly complains about the length of time the tape backups take because of these large databases. My question is, if there is so much free space available within the database, is this not a good candidate for shrinking the database file to make it more manageable?