Okay, I'm not a server administrator, a network guy, or a DBA. I'm merely a programmer helping out a small company. They have IT guy who isn't MS centric (most stuff is on Mac) and he and I are trying to figure out a solution here.

We've got 1 main database. We run nightly full backups. I know they are full backups because I can take the latest file, or any of the daily backups, and go to a completely new machine and "restore" the backup to an empty database and our app runs perfectly fine off of this backup.

The backups have grown from 60 MB to 250MB over 4 months. When running, then log file is 1.7 GB, and the data file is only 200-300 MB. Yes, recovery model is set to full.

So, my question, after all of that, if we are keeping daily backups, and we don't have the need / aren't smart enough to roll the DB back to a certain time, if I change the recovery mode to simple, am I really losing anything?

And, if I do change it to simple, will it completely dump the log file or at least reduce it way the hell down?

And, will that make our database run faster? I know that it'll make my life easier when I copy a relatively recent backup to my local machine to do development and testing...