Our company is running Exchange 2003 on Server 2003. Our primary exchange store file (priv1.edb) keeps growing and is now at over 45GB. If I add up the size of the mailboxes in that store I get less than 16GB. I ran an offline defrag but didn't regain even a single KB from the .edb file (the .stm file shrank from 8GB to 2GB). I've also looked up the size of the Recoverable Items using Performance and it seems insignificant (not sure if the display is in bytes or KB, either way it would not account for the discrepancy). How do I find out what is taking up all this space, and more importantly, how do I remove it?
Exchange 2003 – Reducing Database Size
emailexchange
Best Answer
Are you getting good online backups? My guess is that you're not, and as a result you're seeing delete items piling up instead of being cleaned up. That would be consistent with the lack of any decrease in size that you saw with the offline defragmentation.
You can force deleted item retention to delete items even if the Information Store hasn't had a good online backup, but I'd recommend fixing your backups first if that turns out to be the culprit. If you want to try it, untick the "Do not permanently delete mailboxes and items until the store has been backed up" on the "Limits" tab of the Mailbox Store's properties.
Let us know how it turns out.