Free Space

[Stuartp]

I have inherited an Exchange 2000 Server installation where the drive on which the mailboxes are stored reports only 40mb free, out of a capacity of 8GB. But the total size of all the mailboxes is only about 900MB, and we have deleted some large messages at that, and the free space has not increased.

I've had very little experience with Exchange. IS there something I need to do to free up some space please? I'm worried the whole thing will fall over if it is allowed to get any more full.

Help much appreciated.

Stuart

 

[gmcdonnell]

As a first step take a look at the directory where the Exchange databases are stored (usually something like c:\program files\exchsrvr\mdbdata). If you find a lot of .LOG files that are 5MB in size then you need to backup the Exchange database immediately using an Exchange-aware backup program. *.LOG files are transaction logs that are kept until changes are committed to the Exchange databases. The changes are committed when the databases are backed up. The version of NTBACKUP on the Exchange server is capable of doing an Exchange aware backup.

The LOG files will be deleted automatically after the Exchange database is properly backed up.

If on the other hand you're already doing proper backups of the Exchange databases then you should find that the .EDB and .STM files are taking up most of the space on the drive. These can be shrunk down to remove the "white space" in the database by taking the databases offline and using the ESEUTIL program to defragment them. That's a more complicated process to describe so please take a look at the mdbdata directory first and see if there are a bunch of LOG files.

Gary McDonnell

 

[OdedShafran]

I'd suggest you to get another drive, and just move those DBs to this drive.
Its kinda stupid to delete messages (or to be dependent on Backups until the daily backup - for the Logs to be deleted)...

Oded Shafran, MCP

Oded Shafran,
Network Administrator