In / Out Archive - Drive Space

[Murray720]

I have an Exchange 5.5 box with the following drive partitions-
C 9gb total 7gb free
D 9gb total 41mb free
E 10gb total 8gb free

My problem is my D drive which contains the exchsrvr\imcdata\in\archive and \out\archive directories only has 41mb of free space. The IN directory is 6.10gb and the OUT is 2.22gb. Explorer will not even show the files as which i believe is directly related to the inflated directory size.

Why are my archive directories so large?
How can i clean them up and prevent this from happening in the future?

**side note- I can view and delete from a dos prompt but i believe that's only fixing a symptom and not necessarily solving the problem.

 

[Murray720]

Again my free space dropped below an operating minimum (10mb). Overnight it went form 40mb to nothing. I was able to clear 500mb through a dos prompt but again i do not believe this is the proper solution.

This is a small company with less than 100 users. There should not be that much email.

What is eating up my space?
What is the proper function to clean these Archive directories?
Any suggestions?

 

[WNelson28]

You have probably switched message archiving on for the IMC.

In Exchange Admin bring up the properties of the Internet Mail Service and click the Diagnostics tab, make sure that the message archival feature is set to none then re-start the Internet Mail Service.

If this feature is selected it causes exchange to take a copy of every message that enters or leaves your company and it copies them to the Archive directories you mentioned.

Hope this helps...

 

[Murray720]

thanks WN
i turned off message archiving and solved the problem

 

[SerialCoder]

Great tip! I had over 16 gigs in archived messages!

Thanks,
Dave