I am running Exchange server 2003sp2 and I currently only have 23GB of space left. I was curious if I could map a drive to my exchange machine and relocate the mail store to that mapped drive which resides on the network. Furthermore, when mail is archived is it taken off the exchange server, if so that can save us Gigs worth of space. Please Forgive my ignorance on Exchange. Respectfully, Josh J.

These are the steps you can take as far as my understanding1. Attach a SAN (if possible) or NAS or internal drive on server.2. Create a new store and move some mail boxes (i m sure you will not be able to run offline defrag as you dont want down time and dont have 110% space)3. Move mail boxes to the new store.4. Delete the old store.5. Create a new store and move the mail boxes back , so that you will be able to clear white spaces in the DB.Raj

Thanks, When I move the store doesn't that move the mail boxes as well? Or should I move a couple mailboxes over at a time just to test the water. Josh

You can move but in that case you will not get the white space freed from the exchange database. You can try moving couple of big mail boxes.Raj

When you move the Message Store, all the mailboxes move with it. You are just moving it as is to the new storage space. As long as the destination disk is enough space you should be fine.Mark Morowczynski|MCT| MCSE 2003:Messaging, Security|MCITP:ES, SA,EA|MCTS:Windows Mobile Admin|Security+|http://almostdailytech.com

When you move the Message Store, all the mailboxes move with it. You are just moving it as is to the new storage space. As long as the destination disk is enough space you should be fine.Mark Morowczynski|MCT| MCSE 2003:Messaging, Security|MCITP:ES, SA,EA|MCTS:Windows Mobile Admin|Security+|http://almostdailytech.com

If you move the store to a new drive, there is no change to the mailboxes - they're contained in the store.If the store isn't full, just large, then you should be able to find an Event ID 1221 in the Application log each morning around 5am that tells you how much white space is in the store. If it's not happening, then you need to look at the online maintenance schedule and see if it's completing each night. It's possible the data that is past the deleted-item-retention time limit isn't actually getting cleared from the store.If you're not managing the deleted items folders of the users and they're not getting emptied, that's another thing you can address to clean up the store through managed folder policies.You can create a second store and move some of the users to it - because as your store gets very large, your backup/restore SLAs become hard to maintain, so if you legitimately have >100-200GB store, then you probably want to split it in half. Doesn't solve your full disk issue, but is a best practicee.So, back to the beginning. How big is the drive? how big is the store? what version of Exchange? how many users? Where are the transaction logs? All that is important to determining the right solution.You can not use a network mapped drive to hold the store. You can use an iSCSI LUN to hold the store or any direct attached storage.

Hi, Please try to move the exchange data to the other hard disk which has enough disk space. Related information to share with you: How to protect Exchange data from hard disk failure http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328794 How to manually move the database file location in Exchange 2000 Server and Exchange Server 2003 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/822676 How to move Exchange databases and logs in Exchange Server 2003 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/821915 Regards, Xiu

Hello, I need to move one of my Exchange 2003 databases to a larger volume since it's almost filled up the current one. The EDB file is 74GB and the STM file is 35GB, the current volume where these files reside only has 12GB of free space left. Will that pose a problem when trying to move the files, i.e., is there a minimum amount of head room required on the source volume during the move? I tried to move STM file to alternate location using EMC and Manual process but both are filed with error insufficient resources to perform this operation. KB’s followed: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/822676/en-us http://support.microsoft.com/kb/821915/en-us Try to copy Database and stream files to using xcpoy it’s also failed please advice…. :( Thanks in advance for any guidance!Thanks, GJ

Hello, I need to move one of my Exchange 2003 databases to a larger volume since it's almost filled up the current one. The EDB file is 74GB and the STM file is 35GB, the current volume where these files reside only has 12GB of free space left. Will that pose a problem when trying to move the files, i.e., is there a minimum amount of head room required on the source volume during the move? I tried to move STM file to alternate location using EMC and Manual process but both are filed with error insufficient resources to perform this operation. KB’s followed: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/822676/en-us http://support.microsoft.com/kb/821915/en-us Try to copy Database and stream files to using xcpoy it’s also failed please advice…. :( Thanks in advance for any guidance!Thanks, GJ