8.1 gig of email but filled up 16 gig? (Full Version)

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ktdiehard -> 8.1 gig of email but filled up 16 gig? (12.Feb.2007 2:17:42 PM)

This is a spiraling downward problem over the last few months. First time filled up 16 gig was at 12.something, a few weeks later 10.5 gig, then 9.1 gig, today was 8.1 gig. I have run the offline defrag/repairs (commands below) many many times, ran them over and over again for 9 hours this weekend, to no avail.  No errors are shown when I run these. I immediately hit the 16 gig limit today with 8.1 actual mail boxes.

eseutil /g G:\Exchsrvr\mdbdata\1maildb1.edb /tf:\1maildb1_temp.edb
eseutil /d G:\Exchsrvr\mdbdata\1maildb1.edb /tf:\1maildb1_temp.edb
isinteg -s servername -fix -l G:\isinteg.pri -test alltests

Yes, I know 2000 is old. I am working on it. I have a full upgrade plan including new machines but email was not the first on the list. And I just can't get past seeing 8.1 gig of actual email but that maxes out the 16 gig??

I am not quite sure how to see what version of exchange 2000 I am, so if the recommendation is to patch it please advise me how to see the current version/patches.
System Manager says: Version 5.0 (build 2195, sp4).

Yes I do backup, I use Vertas and there are no .log files in mdbdata other than since my last backup.

Edit to add: I found the Exchange version: 6.0.6249, there appear to be 3 possiable patches after my version but I was only able to find info on the patch for 6.0.6487 which appears to be a security issue patch. I am unsure if it is related to my problem.

Edit: I heard that having virus real protection on the mdb file etc could be a problem. We did recently move the database to a different drive with more space. Yesterday we turned off virus real protection on the mdbdata folder (discovered it was already off on the old database location). I beleive this should then have allowed the on line defrag to free up the actual availalbe space. No go. only 80 meg reported free at last nights online defrag. Tonight I will try and fully turn off realtime virus protection on the computer if possiable.

Edit 2/14/07: Still no ideas anyone?? Turning of the virus protection after 2 nights is still NOT helping, and I will be very lucky if I can manage to end out the week with email runinng at the 17 gig limit. Space is simply  NOT BEING FREED up. Each night the on line defrag MAY report 10 meg free if I am luckly. I tried to fully turn off virus protection last night during the offline defrag, but the server apparently turned it back on as it was back on this morning. So tonight I will do more drastic measures to assure Virus protection is NOT running at all.

PLEASE HELP if anyone has any suggestions.



ktdiehard -> RE: 8.1 gig of email but filled up 16 gig? (15.Feb.2007 6:41:30 PM)

Final update:

First off, a fact, off line defrag gives you no more than what online defrag or eseutil /ms reports as avaiable space.  So an offline defrag doesn't help in this situation. It would help only if you want to reduce the overall size of the file, likley due to deleting a lot of email in a short period of time.

This brings me to mind the person on this forum who said they had to run offline defrag 2x for it to actually reduce the size. I am thinking here that the 2nd offline defrag was run after a online defrag. (beleive me I ran off line defrag no less than 5x last weekend to no avail).

I talked to Miscrosoft on this for some time. They had no soultion.

What I ended up doing is using exmerge to extract all from the database into pst, delete the database, create a new one (is automatically created when the store is mounted), and then use exmerge to bring thoes pst's into the new empty database.

This sounds like much more of a difficult process then it actually is.

From now on I will WATCH my database, and if I see the same conditions I will follow the same process. Altho I don't expect this will repeat.

And yes, I am in line to update all my server room systems, it just takes a bit of time to work my way through them.

Thanks for listing. Hopefully my experience here will help the next person that hits this issue.



uemurad -> RE: 8.1 gig of email but filled up 16 gig? (15.Feb.2007 10:51:45 PM)

Using ExMerge to export and import the messages can actually cause your store to grow in size.  The reason is that Exchange 2000 uses Single Instance Storage (SIS).  Here's an example to illustrate:

Let's say you have 100 people in your mailbox store.  The president sends out pictures of the company picnic to the entire company, and the message size is 10MB.  Because of SIS, the database will grow 10MB plus a small amount for the pointers in each mailbox.  If 50 of those people delete the message, the database will gain almost nothing in white space.

Now, let's say you export those 100 mailboxes and reimport them.  When you do that, you break SIS because each mailbox is exported separately.  When you import them back in, each mailbox that still has the president's pictures takes up 10MB.  So you've just grown the database from 10MB to 1GB for a single (albeit extreme) message.





ktdiehard -> RE: 8.1 gig of email but filled up 16 gig? (19.Feb.2007 6:51:26 PM)

Thanks for the feedback uemurad. I was aware of this. Actually thought I was able to click something in exmerge so it would link up duplicate items. I may have miss-interpurted the option tho. This did not happen. My database is a nice 7.3 gig currently. In fact I am upset it isn't growing fast enough so that I can purge data and actually see the free space in online defrag. LOL. Never satisfied !



uemurad -> RE: 8.1 gig of email but filled up 16 gig? (21.Feb.2007 10:55:06 AM)

I believe the option you saw has to do with matching up messages within the same mailbox (merging), but PST files don't seem to keep the message ID information so it doesn't check against the rest of the store.



ktdiehard -> RE: 8.1 gig of email but filled up 16 gig? (8.May2007 12:06:52 PM)

I would like to add here that this did NOT solve my problem. Only gave me more time to work with. My database is once again growing and even tho I may perge 1gig of data (even tested that this was NOT duplicate data) it never will free up the space. Once again with 7gig of actual mail box sizes, my database is now 14 gig.

I am upgrading exchange, I just had hoped not to do it so soon as other things need upgrading. But Exchange is now the priority due to this problem.

And for anyone else doing this in the future.. Doing the export/import to a new database changes the 'modified date' to the current date. So this means 'mormal' archiving will be effected as items won't be archived until their modified date is beyond the archiving parameters.

In addition. Be aware that any mail box that is inactive will NOT be archived. I had a mail box that I was often refering to for an x employee, and I lost that as it was an inactive mail box and did not export.  (I have a disk backup of the database and will likely get it back during the upgrade move).



ktdiehard -> RE: 8.1 gig of email but filled up 16 gig? (24.Oct.2007 6:44:30 PM)

CAUSE found for this!!!

We did upgrade to exchange 2003 on windows server 2003 etc. And over time we still had the SAME problem. Email just kept on growing and growing.

I finally discovered that we had 9gig of data in our recoverable area. I checked the global settings and they were set to keep deleted items for 7 days. With 100 users there is no way deleted items were 9 gig in size within 7 days.

I did further research and found that you can display the deleted/recoverable items in the mailbox view. When I did this I saw that one mail box (the one we use to archive all emails) had over 9 gig in the recoverable items.

I then looked in Active Directory for JUST that user - ends up at one point that user was set to retain deleted items for 999 days!

So likely all along our problem was this one mailbox which ALL Emails would go through was retaining ALL emails for about 3 years. Despite the fact that I would use exmerge to merge these to a .pst every week.  I set that user settings to retain deleted emails for 0 days, I have no doubt that the next maintenance run will clear out this 10 gig of space.

So needless to say this was a 'stupid user' error. As at one point I must have set that user to retain deleted emails for 999 days.

I would like to add my fustration with Miscrosoft. I did call them on this issue under exchange 2000, and while they did work with me, they did NOT bring up this possibilty nor show me how to see the recoverable deleted items etc. After a few checks they simply said 'upgrade'. You can imagin my fustration when after the upgrade the database continued to grow and grow.

I hope my experience helps someone else out along the way!



verdickt -> RE: 8.1 gig of email but filled up 16 gig? (6.Dec.2007 5:08:02 PM)

I think I have the same problem, have been archiving like hell but after offline defrag the edb file is almost the same size and the stm file is just a little bit smaller.

I hope this works



ktdiehard -> RE: 8.1 gig of email but filled up 16 gig? (6.Dec.2007 5:15:08 PM)

Good Luck!  What version of exchange are you running?



verdickt -> RE: 8.1 gig of email but filled up 16 gig? (7.Dec.2007 12:15:52 PM)

Hi,

I am using exchange 2000 and it was indeed the same problem. However i was wondering how i can display the deleted/recoverable items in the mailbox view as you mentioned in your previous post.



ktdiehard -> RE: 8.1 gig of email but filled up 16 gig? (7.Dec.2007 12:25:31 PM)

I do not think you can see this in Exchange 2000 - I discovered it once I upgraded to Exchange 2003. You may just have to bite the bullet and review every user in Active Directory and check thier settings indvidually.
GOOD LUCK.



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