Overview
If a vault becomes very large, it can become slow and hard to search for objects. To this end, you can use the one-time export from the Content Replication and Archiving section of the M-Files Admin with the "Destroy exported objects" option checked, to export and archive objects that are no longer needed on a day by day operation.
If you are using SQL Server, this will not cause the size of the SQL Server database to shrink. A SQL Server database will always remain the exact same size or grow larger unless the shrink database operation is performed upon it.
Normally, all maintenance operations should be handled by M-Files and from the M-Files Admin. For this particular case, we will need to perform this operation from the SQL Server Management Studio.
Solution
1. Take the vault offline for this operation.
2. From SQL Server, run the shrink db operation. The below link has information on how to perform the shrink operation on the SQL database.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/databases/shrink-a-database?view=sql-server-2017
