To regain program space on a recent project I dropped the SD card logging as well. Since I had another Arduino around I just turned it, with the SD card shield, into a logger. My project outputs data samples via serial prints and the other Arduino reads them and saves them, to the SD card. It's fairly simple to do.
I also made it so that when you're done logging you can just jumper a pin to ground and it will allow displaying or deleting the file and a few other useful things. Pull the jumper and it's a stand alone data logger.