title: how to speed up garbage collection after deleting filestream data
body: <p>My question is on accelerating the speed of filestream garbage collector, the details are disuccsed in <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2158702/sql-server-filestream-delete-speed">this question</a></p>
  
  <p>Let me explain my scenario</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>For debugging/testing reasons i often need to copy a customer DB on my developement machine</li>
  <li>Since DBs sometimes contain too much filestream blob data i prefer to delete it so the backup size moves from 10GB to 2 MB</li>
  <li>I do <code>Update TABLE set BLOB = NULL</code></li>
  <li>And wait for hours or days</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Since I just need to drastically and quickly remove blobs what else can work? Do i need to call <code>checkpoint</code> regularly or delete the Filestream files manually?</p>
  
  <p>THanks.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Update</strong> 
  Just to expresss myself better. This is what I do:</p>
  
  <pre><code>UPDATE TABLE_WITH_BLOBS SET BLOBFIELD = NULL
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and then I ideally would like to have backup size to 2 MB...</p>