Microsoft Exchange maintenance

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We have an archive account at work where a copy of every email send and received is saved and we normally archive a months worth onto a DVD to remove them and stop exchange exceeding it's max size of 72GB.

We used to use a piece of software that my boss wrote to copy 100 emails at a time to a directory that can be burned to a DVD. We have moved to office 2007 and now this is very slow and painful and thus we have over 150000 emails sitting in the Inbox for this account.

I have started making a pst file for each week and moving a bulk load of emails into this pst file but I am limited to about 300-500 at a time else outlook throws a fit and I have 12,000 per week to do so still takes ages
.
I have started using the archive function so move the oldest weeks worth of emails into a pst file and then the next oldest weeks worth into another pst file and so on. This works really well as I can set it going and come back later to do the next load and to burn the last load onto dvd.

When I close the pst archive it doesn't seem to clear any space on the server hosting the mail boxes, which is the main reason we're doing this..to free space on the domain server.

If I checked the mailbox size in exchange system manager and it has shrunk in size and showing the number of emails stored in the main Inbox.

I know maintenance runs every night but not sure what it does.
Does the space the mailbox takes up not change even if you clear out lots of emails and the only way is to run some maintenance to reduce this?

What maintenance should be be running every night and is there maintenances that should be run monthly?

Thanks
Phil
 
Hi There,

You don't need to do any nightly maintenance except the normal Database maintenance, BUT if there are any huge reductions in the size of the mail store, or from the sounds of what you are doing, on a weekly/monthly basis, you would need to use the ESEUTIL utility found on the Exchange CD.. It does an offline defrag and frees up white space in the database which is not free'd up unless you use the utility.


look here for Microsofts offical word on eseutil,


:)
 
Use an MS utility called xmerge weekly/daily to extract the contents of the archive to PST. Name them (maybe by date format) then backup to DVD or other media.

Once the contents of the mailbox has been extracted up to date, keep on top of it and as mentioned, run an offline defrag to reclaim the wasted space.

Your server will probably run maintenance nightly, check the event application logs for event id 1221 and see ow much space you can claim back. If you stores 70+gb and you'll be extracting messages, you're in luck once you catch up. Keep on top of it though, running exmerge daily or weekly and you should be OK.
 
Have you ever thought of using software to archive the mail for you?

Check out a program called mailmeter, it will archive all mail and attachments.

We use this in work and its great, a simple search and in 2 seconds you have an e-mail which someone thought they had lost.
 
I read the microsoft document about doing an offline defrag and is says that you need 110% of the size of the exchange database free to allow the defrag to takeplace. We have 3GB left from a 150GB RAID5 drive and I'm wondering if it is still possible to run the offline defrag?

Cheers
 
armatage said:
I read the microsoft document about doing an offline defrag and is says that you need 110% of the size of the exchange database free to allow the defrag to takeplace. We have 3GB left from a 150GB RAID5 drive and I'm wondering if it is still possible to run the offline defrag?

Cheers

No. you MUST have 110% the database size in free space. Can be on another drive so you could put a USB drive in temporarily (make sure it's USB2)
 
You could look at something like GFI mail archiver to archive all the mail for you. You get 30 days trial of it, so it might be worth firing onto a test environment.

http://www.gfi.com/mailarchiver/

You could try using Disk keeper to defrag the exchange database, though if doing that i would recommend you set it to run constantly over a weekend, and then set it to keep it defragged.
 
JUMPURS said:
You could try using Disk keeper to defrag the exchange database, though if doing that i would recommend you set it to run constantly over a weekend, and then set it to keep it defragged.
You're thinking of a file system defrag, not a defag of the exchange database (afaik only eseutil can do this)
 
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