What is PRIV.EDB??

[snootalope]

Anyone wanna explain to me what exactly priv.edb is? It's like 4.6 GIG on my exchange server and I only have like 70 mailboxxes!! Does this sound right??

"tis better to remain silent and be thought of as a fool..
then open your mouth and remove all doubt" Mark Twain

"I should of been a doctor.." Me

 

[ncvandy]

snootalope,
priv.edb is your private information store where the users mailboxes are kept. It's size will vary with the amount of data your users save in their mailbox. 4.6G is not excessive though if I had to guess I would say you have a least a couple of users with large mailboxes.

Jim

Elegant solutions are nice, but right now I'll settle for whatever works.

 

[snootalope]

Ok.. one more question then..

I use ARCserve 2000 to back up the users mailboxxes, bricklevel.. So, if I'm backing up the boxxes in bricklevel, I shouldn't have to back up the 4.6gig priv file right? Cause it's practically the same thing.. am i wrong in saying that?

"tis better to remain silent and be thought of as a fool..
then open your mouth and remove all doubt" Mark Twain

"I should of been a doctor.." Me

 

[cq]

Brick level backup tends to be much slower than file backup, if you've got the time and tape then back up priv.edb.

Pete

 

[Americas911]

I don't know much about ARCserve, I use Veritas and do fulls on the weekend and incrementals every night. If you only have one server, backup the mailboxes also. If you have more than one exchange server, you can just do the information store, because after a crash you can build a new exchange server, restore the information store, then run the consistancy adjuster on the priv and it will rebuild your mailbox containers.
I'm not sure if thats what you were wondering about, but I thought I'd throw it out there.

 

[fuego007]

I would recommend backing up the priv.edb in addition to the brick-level. The reason is simple; while brick-level gives you the ability to restore an individual mailbox, using it to restore every mailbox after a crash would result in the loss of single instance storage. This would result in a priv.edb that is significantly larger than it is now.

If you don't know what single instance storage is, here's the skinny: If a user sends an e-mail with an attachment to 100 users on the same server, the attachment is saved once and a pointer is placed in each recipient's mailbox. The attachment will be there forever unless every recipient deletes the message. If that attachment was 1 MB in size and you used a brick-level backup to restore your server you would end up with 100 individual copies of the attachment. Now, instead of taking up 1MB of your priv.edb, it's taking up 100MB!

Bob