Exchange Server C Drive low on space

[DSapseid]

My exchange server suddenly stopped working this morning. After a quick look it was because the c drive only had 30mb free!! ran disk cleanup nad it freed 1.4gb. I then restarted it to make sure it was ok. I was then sitting at my desk watching the c drive space drop again slowly on the exchange monitor. I thought i would check and see if anybodys mailbox was huge and the caretakers mailbox was 1.5gb he only sends and recieves about 4 emails a week!! I logged onto his OWA and he had over 200 copies of emails with 5mb attachments so bang there was the problem. I sat there and deleted all the duplicates. Emptied the deleted items folder but it hasnt given me back the 1.5gb and the free space on the cdrive is currently at 90mb!!

 

Is there a way that i can force exchange 2003 to release that 1.5gb?

[Simon_Gibbs]

not sure about that, but when I had trouble my exchange, after some rooting around, we found that the backup wasn't properly clearing the exchange logs, so we forced a manual backup, exchange logs cleared, 10gb of space reclaimed! Score!

[CyberNerd]

limit mailbox size, so that runs out before the disk does.

[DSapseid]

That sounds good where did you find the logs? Do you mean the backup overnight (will check logs on backup server)?

[Busybub]

Is there a way that i can force exchange 2003 to release that 1.5gb?

 

Only if you run an offline defrag but even then that will only work if you have 110% of your existing mail store as excess capacity into which the server can do it's stuff (can be in another partition if you have any).

 

Defragment Exchange 2000/2003 Server Databases

 

and

 

How to defragment with the Eseutil utility (Eseutil.exe)

[srochford]

Shouldn't need to run a defrag to get the space back but I have an idea it's one of those things which happen overnight.

 

check in "Program Files\Exchsrvr\MDBDATA" for *.log files. If they're older than your last backup then the backups are not working properly - do a manual backup and the logs should be deleted (you mustn't delete them manually because you will be well and truly knackered if anything goes wrong!)

 

Check in \windows\system32\logfiles\w3svc1 (or other w3svc folders) - these are the web logs; if you don't clear them out then they will grow.

 

Look in c:\windows for any $ntuninstallxxxxx folders - these can be deleted if you don't think you're going to want to uninstall any hotfixes, patches etc (but don't touch $hf_mig$)

 

Does the server have a second drive? if so, can you move the pagefile there? This will need a reboot but is often a quick way to grab back a few gigabytes of space!

 

Check in "\Program Files\Exchsrvr\.log" - this folder has logs for all email transactions. I think the default is to keep 14 days but it can be adjusted. You can delete all but today's log safely if you don't use them.

[DSapseid]

check in "Program Files\Exchsrvr\MDBDATA" for *.log files. If they're older than your last backup then the backups are not working properly - do a manual backup and the logs should be deleted (you mustn't delete them manually because you will be well and truly knackered if anything goes wrong!)

 

1.6gb of .log files 1.1gb from friday

 

 

Check in \windows\system32\logfiles\w3svc1 (or other w3svc folders) - these are the web logs; if you don't clear them out then they will grow.

 

256mb in here can i just delete them?

 

Look in c:\windows for any $ntuninstallxxxxx folders - these can be deleted if you don't think you're going to want to uninstall any hotfixes, patches etc (but don't touch $hf_mig$)

 

197mb here - now deleted bot the hf_mig file though

 

Does the server have a second drive? if so, can you move the pagefile there? This will need a reboot but is often a quick way to grab back a few gigabytes of space!

 

Yep there is a second partition that holds the students datafiles - 20gb free though. EDIT Pagefile now moved successfully

 

Check in "\Program Files\Exchsrvr\.log" - this folder has logs for all email transactions. I think the default is to keep 14 days but it can be adjusted. You can delete all but today's log safely if you don't use them.

 

folder is empty.

 

Thanks for all your help.

Edited July 7, 2008 by DSapseid

[srochford]

sounds like you're winning :-)

 

The 1.1Gb of files from Friday mean that you haven't had a successful backup since Friday - if that's normal (eg you only do a full backup on Monday night) then there's nothing to worry about. If you think you do a full backup every day then check - it hasn't worked since Friday :-(

 

You can delete the web logs - they're just useful so you know who uses OWA but if you're not bothered then just wipe them; again, you need to leave "today's"