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ICTdesk.net
Asked: 2011-04-09 04:40:32 +0800 CST

Exchange server 2003 databases are growing rapidly

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We are running Exchange Server 2003 and we have about 400 users and a quota limit of 250MB per mailbox.

We had about 8GB of free space left, and that was always enough, but now since since about 2 weeks ago, all of a sudden the exchange databases are growing rapidly.

I already had to resize the disk and added an extra 40GB, but now that is already down to 33GB and still going down at a rate of 1GB a day.

The mailboxes do not seem to get larger. So what is taking up all that space?

Can someone give me some advice on how to troubleshoot this problem?

I have read something about offline defrag (eseutil), that might help to free up some space, but I think it will not solve the root cause.

Circular logging is enabled.

windows-server-2003 exchange exchange-2003

2 Answers

  1. You will need to do an offline defrag of your databases to reclaim space. You can do this with the eseutil but obviously an offline defrag means downtime. Check out this article on how to use eseutil to perform an offline defrag: Eseutil Offline Defrag

    Eseutil can be found in the install director of exchange under the Bin directory:

    C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\bin

    Make sure you have a good backup of the databases before running the defrag. Then dismount the databases and run eseutil /d <database>

    Also check on your Deleted item retention period. It may be that users are deleting lager items that have been coming in. These deleted messages wouldn't count toward their mailbox size but would impact the size of your databases.

    KB249680 - Deleted Item Retention

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  2. Best Answer

    While trying the other good suggestions, I have found the cause of the problem. I probably should have been more complete in my description of what has changed in the environment. We are currently changing our backup software. It seems(I don't know for sure yet) that one of the last backups failed and that this caused ongoing increasing in size of the files. I did a new successfull backup, and since then/until now (2days) the files are not increasing in size. My guess it that the backup software is setting some kind of archive or expiry settings in the exchange databases. So for now it is solved. I will however try to do a Offline Defrag to see if some space can be reclaimed. Thanks to everybody who gave me suggestions that pointed guided me in the right direction.

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