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Mailstore size - 28.Jun.2011 3:10:19 AM

XMHell

Posts: 3
Joined: 28.Jun.2011
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Exchange 2003 Standard on Windows Server 2003 Standard, all fully patched.

Kaspersky AV solution.

I moved several GB of old emails out of a few of our biggest user accounts by creating new Outlook data file on my machine (logged in as each respective user in turn) and used the 'Move to folder' feature in Outlook, with a view of shifting the selected messages into the new PST file.

So far so good, and the selected messages in each users mailbox have been successfully moved into the new PST files.

I should point out that the long term goal is to re-import them back into GFI MailArchiver to give a complete historical archive.

Last night I ran an offline defrag, and here are the file sizes before and after:

priv1.edb: was 59,496,712 kb and currently 59,429,896 kb

priv1.stm: was 19,580,936 and currently 17,784,840 kb

By my reckoning I removed almost 5 GB of emails from three mailboxes.

There are no errors in the Event Log

What can I do to successfully reduce the size of the mailstore and am I getting too close to the 75GB max limit, or is there (hopefully) some white space in there that is usable ?

I understand that the store files may not shrink significantly, which is fine - I just don't want to have the whole server fall over in a heap and dismount on me if there is something I could/should be doing.

Please be gentle with me - I have been shoehorned into looking after Exchange for our organisation and, as you can probably tell from the above, Exchange is not my area of expertise (but I am trying to learn, fast).

Thanks in advance for any input/recommendations.

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RE: Mailstore size - 28.Jun.2011 6:20:07 AM

XMHell

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Joined: 28.Jun.2011
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Thanks for your reply, which makes a lot of sense even to an Exchange newbie :)

What about my overall capacity ?

Based on the physical database sizes are they anything to worry about ?

I understand that there may be usable white space inside of them but the physical size of the files is my main concern at the moment.

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RE: Mailstore size - 28.Jun.2011 7:03:26 AM

XMHell

Posts: 3
Joined: 28.Jun.2011
Status: offline

Thanks again for such an informative reply.

From your post it looks like I'm in bad shape.

The offline defrag only recovered 181 MB of free space, so I'm looking at:

59,429,896 kb + 17,784,840 kb - 181 MB

In theory that puts me at about 77 GB combined space (in KB) or 73.9 GB physical size when using right click >> properties on the .edb and .stm files.

Panic stations...

Settings for retention are 7 days for deleted items and 30 days for mailboxes.

I can feel a company wide cleardown coming on...

Post #: 3

RE: Mailstore size - 28.Jun.2011 7:49:53 AM

mark@mvps.org

Posts: 6811
Joined: 9.Jun.2004
From: Philadelphia PA
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AND. AND... AND.......
You have to remember that it takes a couple of cycles to get all the clean-up done and the whitespace identified. You can't, for example, do the moves and hard-deletions at 3pm and expect to get back elebenty gigabytes at 10pm. Give it a couple of days. The online defrag only runs at the end of the other processes and then for an extra 15 minutes. If you are doing a big purge on a low power system (and a 2003 box is a low RAM box due to the architecture) you aren't going to get it all back immediately.

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Mark Arnold (Exchange MVP)
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(in reply to XMHell)

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RE: Mailstore size - 28.Jun.2011 4:54:11 PM

mark@mvps.org

Posts: 6811
Joined: 9.Jun.2004
From: Philadelphia PA
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For sure. Deleted Item Retention has got a big role to play. You're looking at the default 14 days before event 1221 even begins to report free space.

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Mark Arnold (Exchange MVP)
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Post #: 5