Hello We are running Exchange 2007 SP2 in a two node CCR. Some of the LUN's on our nodes are getting a little full, and I have noticed that the *.ci files on the active and passive nodes are sometimes 1,2 or even 3GB in size. What I want to know, is if some of these files have not been modified for more than 6months, am I okay to delete them? For example for one of our Storage Groups, the Database .ci file on the passive node is 3gb and the Date Modified is 8\9\2009. There are other large *.ci files under the same Catalogue directory, but I wondered if I can delete the old one's and reclaim the space. Thanks Rob

1,2,3 or even 12GB is not necessarily large. CI's will come to about 5% of your DB size, VERY approximately so you may not gain anything. You can't just delete the files as such. You have to stop the Exchange search service then remove the content indexing folder and restart the service. Exchange will then recreate the index from fresh. Problem is that while it is doing that Outlook searching will be slow and restricted to to/from and subject. And DO not do all the CI's at once, Exchange reindexes them serially not in parallel. You might want to check that indexing is actually taking place as well. Check performance monitor, if you have 8 databases you should have a counter that will say 8 content indexes being kept up to date by notification. Neill

Thanks Neil So would you expect to see totally different size and number of ci files on the active and passive nodes? Out DB files are roughly 50gb in size, and we have 20DB's per CCR Cluster. So i can't delete the file on the passive node, even though its not been used\accessed for over a year?

Thanks again Neil. Regards Rob

Neil A couple of other quick questions. If I was to remove the passive copy of a Database and re-seed, would Exchange re-build the Index itself? Also, you say that I cna turn off the Indexer Service, can this be done per SG\DB or its is turned off for the Server and then I could Delete ALL the ci files for ALL 20 Databases? Cheers Rob

Thanks very much for the advice. Following your advice, I have resolved my diskspace issue on my exchange server 2007. I moved old CI files to different location and will be deleted after few days. I keep few latest CI files. I appreciate your wisdom