RE: Exchange 2003 store size mystery

  • From: "Rick Boza" <rickb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "[ExchangeList]" <exchangelist@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Sun, 15 May 2005 17:14:52 -0400

Welcome to the wonderful world of white space.

Even though you archived all the data out of the store, what you wind up
with is 1GB of "real" data and 53GB of "empty" data that could be
recovered through an offline defrag.  You could also (depending on your
configuration) have some stuff left in the dumpster that is also taking
up space, which would become white space once you reach your retention
time limits.  So basically, you are seeing exactly what should be
expected given the operation you have outlined.

Now, having said all that - I have to ask, can you outline why you
decided to move all the email to PSTs?  Every client I have is more
interested in eliminating PSTs than exploring them as the long-term
solution to a problem.  The things you lose - centralized backup,
dumpster and data recoverability,  centralized management, enforceable
policies, etcetera, etcetera - by doing so seem to outweigh any positive
of doing so.  What driver would push you to such a decision?

Rick

-----Original Message-----
From: A. Michael Salim [mailto:msalim@xxxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Sunday, May 15, 2005 2:28 PM
To: [ExchangeList]
Subject: [exchangelist] Exchange 2003 store size mystery

http://www.MSExchange.org/

Hi all,

I have a mystery about the size of my mailbox store.  I have an Exchange
2003 Enterprise server with a store size of about 45GB (the .EDB file is
45GB in size).  The mystery is that this is nowhere near what the size
whould be.  The store should be no more than 1-2GB in size.  Everything
else seems to be fine i.e. the server is receiving and sendimg emails
fine, OWA is fine, RPC/HTTP is fine, OMA is fine, performance seems
fine, no complaints from users.

However there is some background to the story:  This time last week the
store was indeed about 54GB in size.  Then it was decided that all
users'
mailboxes would be saved to local PST files and cleared and everyone
will start with a "zero size"  mailbox effective Friday (for unrelated
and valid reasons).  So on Friday I did a complete backup, then ran
Exmerge in "Archive" mode so that all mailboxes would be saved to PST
files and cleared from the maikbox store.  The Exmerge seems to have
gone normally as far as I can tell (all 115 mailboxes succeeded etc.)
and the individual mailboxes did indeed get cleared out as expected, and
each mailbox got saved as expected in a PST file with the old data.  But
the mailbox store (.EDB file) size was still 54GB.  When viewed in ESM
(Exchange System Manager 2003) the mailboxe sizes are all tiny an do not
add up to even 1GB.

I noticed this discrepency so I ran eseutil etc. on it defrag the store
(after dismounting the store of course).  The defrag ran just fine, no
errors.  I remounted the mailbox store.  Everything is still running
smoothly.  I dismounted and ran "isinteg -fix -test alltests" and that
ran fine too, zero errors/fixes/warnings for all 20 tests first time
around.
And everything is still running just fine and dandy after remount.

Except that the store EDB file is 45GB in size (it shrank from 54GB to
45GB but it should have shrunk to maybe 1Gb or 2GB).

Any clues or suggestions?  I do need to get the EDB file size down to
the correct size of 2GB or less.

Best regards
Mike


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