Space problems with Exchange 2000

twistedfaith

twistedfaith

twistedfaith

Associate
Joined
16 Aug 2007
Posts
198
Location
Derbyshire
About 3 weeks ago our exchange 2000 machine reached its last 400mb of space (bricking it wouldn't do justice to what we were doing!) and luckily we found a 10gb file which was a backup of the exchange from about 2 years ago. Deleted that and recovered the space and we breathed a huge sigh of relief. Thing is over the last couple of weeks, the space has rapidly disappeared and we are down to our last 1gb - the problem is that we don't know how the space is being taken up. All users (roughly 50 active users) actually recieve e-mails onto a PST on their computers and it isn't stored on the server (as far as we're aware). Also, our boss has message archiving for EVERY mailbox on the server, but that is also being directly sent to her offline pst file on her laptop.

Should the server be losing free space like this and if so, is there any way we can recover it? I have tried downloading all e-mails from inactive users etc but that hasn't done anything. Theres no more files for us to delete either. Help!

Thanks!
 
As far as I am aware, even if you delete an email from Exchange it doesnt get fully removed from the store. There is a setting on the mailbox store to set how long deleted items are retained so it may be an idea to check that out.

A way you can manually free up this is to perform an offline defrag of the mailboxes. Have a look at this LINK to get the instructions.

The other thing which could be causing this is the log files. I've had the problem before where log files filled the drive up causing the server to crash. Have a look on the share (normally \\<server>\<server>.LOG\ and see if the log files are huge. If they are try to clear some down.
 
Exchange creates log files to contain the mail and these will just build up until you do a full Exchange aware backup or manually purge them.

I'd be betting that your backup application isn't working or doesn't have an Exchange agent.

The log files need to be cleared down (by backup) every day really to keep the system healthy. Don't defrag your Exchange drive until you have a good backup routine running (and even then, its a hairy process fraught with pitfalls).

In emergencies you can enable Circular Logging in Exchange which forces it to only maintain 5 small log files that are then overwritten as mail transactions occur.

This is ok in some scenarios to get a mail store to mount but is a disaster waiting to happen because you don't have any ability to replay the logs in a failure scenario.

Concentrate on getting your backups sorted and you might be ok - you might also want to think about a migration to new hardware or moving the mailstores to a new, larger disk array.
 
I would love to migrate to better hardware, we're running an old Dell server with server 2000...but our company won't agree with an upgrade cos the current system works - very hard to convince them to spend money on anything. I will look at the log files, from what I have seen so far, it seems that they could be the cause of the space loss. Just one question tho - is it ok to just delete them or do I have to be careful about which ones I delete?
 
Normally theres a log for each day (there is here at least), so make sure you only delete the files which were created BEFORE your last full backup. If you delete the ones created after your backups might start complaining
 
Won't upgrade..?

Just point out to them that you won't be held responsible if the system dies or cannot manage.. With 50 users it wouldn't be that expensive to move to Exchange 2003/2007 and new hardware.

In the meantime, you can set the properties of the server to keep so many days, then look here on how to delete them.

Also look at here on how to manually defragment the database, which unfortunately isn't done automatically (unless you set a batch file to run on a schedule!) The defrag shouldn't take long, just ensure that you have enough disk space (150% of the Information Store size) free or it will go belly up.
 
TheKnat said:
Normally theres a log for each day (there is here at least), so make sure you only delete the files which were created BEFORE your last full backup. If you delete the ones created after your backups might start complaining
Click to expand...
Huh?? Each log is 5megs in size, you must have very little traffic if you only have one log file a day. And as i mentioned you should NOT Delete them manually unless you know what you are doing.
 
Hmmm I'll have to double check again but the logs I was talking about seem to only 1 a day and we get lots of traffic.

We've deleted log files in the past with no problem, as long as the current day's log file is there for the backup. We've had to do this when moving large mailboxes around which has generated huge log files. This has never caused us any recovery problems when we have had to perform restores on this server.
 
Get your backup working properly before you do anything else. If you don't you WILL regret it.

Simply running a proper Exchange aware backup will manage the log files automatically.
 
We run the built in windows backup and, as far as I'm aware, it backs everything up just fine - no errors or anything. I don't know how big the logs are, I did a search on the server with *.log and it came up with a few thousand files with the log extension and each one was about 5mb. I think theres approx 3gb worth, but I'm not sure.
 
If you've run the backup and those Exchange log files are still there, then the backup job isn't configured correctly to handle the Exchange data.

I would strongly recommend that you get some professional help from someone experienced in Exchange 2000 Admin and Backups - while doing nothing will result in your mailstore simply dismounting, tinkering or changing settings that you don't understand could result in a mailstore corruption.

Ask yourself how much you value your email and then ask the boss to organise some professional help.
 
sidethink said:
If you've run the backup and those Exchange log files are still there, then the backup job isn't configured correctly to handle the Exchange data.

I would strongly recommend that you get some professional help from someone experienced in Exchange 2000 Admin and Backups - while doing nothing will result in your mailstore simply dismounting, tinkering or changing settings that you don't understand could result in a mailstore corruption.

Ask yourself how much you value your email and then ask the boss to organise some professional help.
Click to expand...

It does look like the exchange backups have been done wrong all this time, just the mailbox stores and not the exchange etc. I have sorted that out so hopefully that should work now. As for the professional help, that WON'T happen at all in any capacity - our bosses won't spend money and won't listen to what me and my colleague say because both of us have only been in the job for a few months (me 2 months, colleague 5 months). The only time money will be spent on the servers will be when they collapse into small piles of dust and then we will probably be asked to turn an old Dell desktop into a server or something. Sucks, but thats the way it is. All those links above have helped me out big time - also found ANOTHER mail storage backup on the HDD taking up 8gb of space (not been modified since 2004). So I'm sending that to a network backup drive and deleting it.
 
I got the backing up sorted - the only problem I have now is that the backup won't run due to "unused media" in the drive. I run prepare through computer management for each tape as I change them, as I have been told that this formats them...is this true? the method seems to be hit or miss..also how do I check if the logs are being flushed? Thanks!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom