Database Size Not The Same As All Mailboxes Added Up

[ryanropp]

In system manager, my total size of all mailboxes added up is 26gb's. However, in the exchsrvr directory, it shows the priv1.edb and .stm as 34gb's. I ran offline defrag yesterday but it only freed up 2 gb's. What else can I do to get the numbers the same???

Thanks

 

[NortonES2]

does the 26Gb include the deleted items?

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If it doesn't leak oil it must be empty!!

 

[ryanropp]

The 26gb's comes from adding up all the mailbox sizes in system manager

 

[NortonES2]

Then you need to include the size of the deleted items as well. In system Manager select view, Add \ Remove columns and select deleted items.

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If it doesn't leak oil it must be empty!!

 

[ryanropp]

Thanks for the info. I checked deleted items and it's only 700mb. Still cant account for 7gb's.

 

[PaulGillespie]

I beleive the edb is a relational database so that one email in everyone's mailbox will only be stored once where as the mailbox size is every email they have if you know what i mean. So the combined mailbox size will include many duplicate emails which are not in the edb.

Think this is right.

 

[Zelandakh]

The difference is DIRT. 26GB of emails covers 34GB of space. You have some economies of scale with SIS (single instance storage) and the rest is deleted item retension. Check the SG for the number of days to retain deleted items which can be recovered using recover deleted items in Outlook.

 

[xmsre]

Deleted items.

You need to understand how the process works before running a defrag. When an item is deleted, it's just marked deleted. The item is retained until after the first online maintenance after the expiration of the deleted items retention period. If you want to recover the space, you have to wait:

1. Until deleted items retention period has expired.
2. The next online maintenance cycle after the expiration of deleted items retention completes.

Then you can do an offline defrag and recover the space.

With all of that said and done, unless you have permanently removed a large amount of mail, the whole exercise is fairly pointless. As users get mail, pages within the database are allocated. As users delete mail, pages are freed. During online maintenance, the free space is consolidated only to start the cycle over again the next day. Even if you did succeed in removing the free space with an offline defrag, if you have not permanantly removed a large amount of mail (migrated users to another store/server, imposed smaller mailbox limits, etc.), within a day or two the free space will return. If you monitor the online defrag completion events in your application log for a while, you'll soon come to the conclusion that the amount of free space in your database is roughly equivalent to your change delta (not a bad idea to know what your change delta is by the way, if you're doing snapshot backups). This is normal.