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September 29th, 2008 08:00

Mail store size after shortcutting

I am new to the EmailXtender world so please forgive my ignorance...We have had long-term EX server issues which have just recently been resolved. I started a shortcutting task last week that, due to a long lapse, took 4.5 days to run. It seems to complete OK, but my Exchange admin tells me the mail store size has not decreased at all. The EX servers are running the latest version/patch and the Exchange server is 2003.

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September 29th, 2008 09:00

Hi SungardMike,

Just curious what type of long-term EX service issues were you having? and was it on build .655?

Your mail store file sizes will not decrease after a shortcut/archive task. However, during online maintenance which usually runs each evening unless changed, will create whitespace inside the mail store which will be reused. See, the store is online, and only so much can be done without affecting your users connectivity to the DB. Some things must be done offline.

If you are interested in reducing your mail store size, you'll have to run offline maintenance on each store, such as eseutil with the degrag option. It's also a good time to run isinteg if you have some extra time, to fix DB problems that could creep up on you.

Look on your Exchange servers for event 1221, that will tell you how much free space you have in each mail store.

September 29th, 2008 09:00

Most of the issues occurred before I started working here and seemed to be resolved by upgrading to build .655. Mostly corrupt indexes, search problems, etc. I will pass your suggestions on to my admin to see if this resolves his issue.

September 29th, 2008 11:00

Be careful on doing an offline defrag...it's NOT recommended by Microsoft unless you have serious fragmentation of the mail stores. But after shortcutting as mentioned, the store doesn't get smaller, but Exchange is able to utilize the whitespace created after its ONLINE defrag has run. It does a pretty good job on its own.

If you want to get that space back on the drive and make the stores smaller, you can do an offline defrag, but that requires that those stores are taken offline. I recommend doing a full backup before the defrag, and right after it. Any backup jobs taken before the offline defrag will be null and void.

I have only done offline defrags on my spam server and to clear out any old exchange servers that might be redeployed elsewhere.
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