Deleted Mailboxes but disk space has not increased

[coopermarsh]

Hiya

I have deleted around 900Mb worth of Email from the server but the disk space has not increased help. I thought the ESE97 would have cleared the priv database.

 

[zbnet]

Deleting mail may do nothing to the amount of email stored - because of single instance storage, if >1 person has a link to a mail item (and commonly mail is stored in the inbox of the recipient and the sent items of the sender) then just deleting it from one mailbox doesn't remove the email from the server (because of the remaining link to the mail item). So it is perfectly possible to delete huge quantities of email from a server and not affect the amount of stored email at all (although the indexes will be a little smaller).

Even if you do manage to render email as deleted, if you have a deleted item retention period set, it won't disappear until this expires.

Even when the server sees the mail has no links to it, and the deleted item retention period has expired, all that happens is the space the email took up is designated as white space (essentially reusable). The overall size of the priv.edb doesn't change at all.

The next night your overnight database maintenance period should kick in and start the online defrag, the function of which is to shuffle all the real data together at one end of the file, and the white space all together at the other end of the file. Having the white space contiguous like this makes the writing of new mail items into the database more efficient. But even this online defragging doesn't alter the physical size of the priv.edb.

The only way to make the priv.edb smaller (ie remove the white space) is to do an offline defrag using the eseutil utility. This is generally a bad idea for at least 3 reasons: it takes your server down so your users cannot use Exchange; it takes ages; and even when you've finished and you put the database back online again, the first thing Exchange has to do when a new mail item arrives is make the priv.edb bigger again, because there isn't any white space in the file to store the new mail in!

Just about the only time you need to do an offline defrag is when you create significant chunk of white space that you'd like to remove - say with a bulk mailbox migration to another server. Otherwise, you're better off leaving well alone.

 

[N0ktar]

True, add storage and leave DB alone.

 

[coopermarsh]

OK no problem, found where my disk space had gone though

imcdata/in/archive & imcdata/out/archive 10 Gb worth

is this ok to delete, if so how can i stopit writing too the archive

 

[N0ktar]

Properties of Internet Mail Service, Diagnostics Logging tab, Message Archival. Set it to None, delete what you have already accumulated in that directory and in \out\archive.

 

[coopermarsh]

Cheers for all the help everyone

 

[zbnet]

N0tar neglected to add that you have to stop and restart the IMS service for it to pick up the new logging level.

 

[coopermarsh]

I guessed that, thanks for all youe help.