Exchange 2003 Data Base is reaching 75 gig limit

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macxsanity

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We run an exchange server 2003 Sp2 database our mail organisation has about 40 mail boxes with the largest mail box being about 3 gigs in size , i have also set mailbox storage limits on all users mail boxes and even ran an offline defregabout 3 months back , but the mail store keeps on getting lager , should i run isinteg so as to correct some inconsistancies in the mail store , please guys your help will be grealty valued
 
Honestly if you think the Mail store is damaged and gulping up more storage than it should you may need to do a rebuild,otherwise upgrade/impose better restrictions/archive
 
create additional info store - move some mailboxes - offline defrag
 
Have you checked that you do not have mailbox retention selected where deleted items will not be cleared out.
 
First check what Yoda said, then do another offline defrag, only way to claim free space.
Also check your event logs, when maintenance runs (I hope you have that scheduled) you will see a event id 1221 (Usually after Online defrag has run)that will show you exactly how much free space you have in your DB. If you have no space, well, get they people to delete, wait a week or 2 and do another offline defrag

If your DB is consistent you should not have to run anything else
 
You can't have more than one storage group on Exchange 2003 Standard edition.
if you go to your storage group and view the mailboxes, goto view -> add/remove columns -> then add "Deleted Items(KB)" this way you can see if your retention policies aren't correctly configured. you can quickly calculate how much deleted items are still in your database
I don't think isinteg is going to help much here, it's best to do a isinteg check after a defrag though...

Realistically though 3GB per user is probably too much.

EDIT: typing like a prawn...!!!
 
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Upgrade to Exchange 2003 Enterprise edition, then your store can be as big as 16TB.
 
modify "deleted items retention time" for mailboxes and mail items to 1 day.
restart the IS service. and stop it again.
do the offline defrag
But do the offline defrag to a new (copy) database on a different drive to the original. (use the /t switch)
(the offline defrag will run twice as fast (when defragging onto a different hard drive) while keeping the original Information store intact)
"eseutil /d /ds /tF:\newIS\New-IS-Name.edb /p"
Once complete, move the defrag'd IS to the original location (rename the old DB and keep it (in-case the defrag didn't go well))
restart Exchange services and modify "deleted items retention time" back to 30 days.
restart IS service.

if you've never done an offline defrag before (or long ago) and your users have never permanently "purged" their deleted items then you may score big time. (size wise).

My quarterly offline defrags on 40-60GB information stores usually gain about 30% of the information size.
good for a couple of months in your case.
 
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