Increasing disk space usage in Exchange 2010
Hello:We had until last week an Exchange 2003 server with one 70GB database, and after performing a clean install of Exchange 2010 and restoring all pst's the free space on the Exchange DB's partition was 100+ GB (saturday) today its only 25GB.... any ideas?? (the free space before restoring any pst's was 210GB)Thanks!!PS New disks are on the way but why is this behavior?? Archive is enabled for all (40) mailboxes.------- UPDATE:I guess there's something left to be configured... Our 2 databases are curently 40GB each (82+GB total) but the log files are growing to fast and are using also 40GB on each mailbox database folder.... now free space at 17GB HELP PLEASE!!!!UPDATE 2:Ok so the problem are the log files, but now I don't know which files I'm able to delete without making any damage!!!... I haven't implemented any backup system yet so I'm not sure if moving the older files will affect current operations... their size now is 44GB per DB
March 2nd, 2010 11:09pm

Final Update:After downloading CA Arcserve 14 and creating a backup some of the log files were removed without any manual operation. Notice that we manually moved some logs from the first database before making the backup and the logs remained there after the backup was completed but on the other database it was successfull and without our interventionL
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March 3rd, 2010 4:46pm

It sounds like you are running into one of the biggest changes between Exchange 2003 and 2010 - the removal of the single instance storage, for example, where on Exchange 2003 if an email was sent to multiple users, only one copy of the email would be stored (per database anyway), with Exchange 2010 that has now been removed so where previously an email sent to 10 people might only have been stored once on disk, it is now stored 10 times and so the disk space requirements for Exchange 2010 have increased. There is an article on this over on MSExchangeteam which goes into more detail on the changes and the reasons why the changes were made.My blog: http://www.monkeydust.net | Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/MrYiff
March 3rd, 2010 5:01pm

This is normal, the log files will stay until everything gets written into the store, Exchange 2010 doesnt do this immediately so you can often get large amounts of log files. However when you use a backup program that can work with Exchange, it will write all the log files into the store and then remove them so dont manually delete any log files unless you are aware of the consequences - in this case it will likely mean losing mail! You may find this technet article of interest as it discusses some of the storage requirements of Exchange 2010. One other thing to do is to look at where that space is being used, it could be that a user has suddenly imported a lot of unexpected mail, give this command a try from the Exchange Management Shell (this is from one of my Exchange 2007 scripts but it should still work for 2010): Get-Mailbox | Get-MailboxStatistics | sort -Property TotalItemSize -Descending | select-object DisplayName,@{Name="TotalItemSize(MB)";Expression={$_.TotalItemSize.Value.ToMB()}} This will list the mailbox size for all users in your organisation so if you have a hundreds or thousands of users you may want to look at changing it otherwise you may hit performance issues.My blog: http://www.monkeydust.net | Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/MrYiff
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March 3rd, 2010 5:42pm

Thanks NickWe've found another workaround to get rid of all the old log files that weren't removed with the backup. We apply the circular logging, dismount and mount the first database and... done... all the unrequired logs were removed... after that we removed the circular logging and used again arcserve to backup that particular database and now all the logs are removed after the succesfully operation is done.L
March 3rd, 2010 9:10pm

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