Hello, We use a third-party application from one of the major SAN vendors to do online (bcv) backups of our E2k3 server. The backup failed for few days and our dedicated transaction log disk became full, so one storage group dismounted. So we moved a few of the oldest trans logs to another disk and restarted Exchange. The we decidided to do an online backup to disk using Ntbackup just to have a good backup and purge the logs. But only 4-5 of the more recent trans logs were removed after the backup completed. We then ran eseutil /mh and it reported a clean shutdown with the last log range as 0-0. So we manually moved the rest of the older trans log files. Some questions: 1. Can anyone please tell me why Ntbackup didnt remove all the old trans log files? 2. Is there a safe eseutil command to automatically remove all committed old log files? Now of course we'll figure out why our basic disk space and backup alerts didnt work. Thanks, - Alan.

1. Probably becasue NTBackup was unable to find those log files, probably you moved them manually 2. this will be helpful http://support.microsoft.com/kb/240145 eseutil shows you which logs can be deleted but does not perform deletion, you delete not neccessary transaction logs from OS (good idea to move them first to external storage or backup somewhere else) and then remove them from exchange serverWith kind regards Krystian Zieja http://www.projectnenvision.com Follow me on twitter My Blog

Thanks Krystian. 1. We only moved a few of the oldest trans log files. There were still many others. Do you think that if it can't find all the logfiles that it expects to find, then it purges none? 2. Yes, that's the (excellent) kb which we followed. So there's no automatic way to force a purge of logfiles then, if Ntbackup doesn't work?

If Exchange can't see the complete set of logs, then nothing will be purged, and the backup job will technically fail. If you run out of space and need to get space back as a temporary measure then you can compress the logs using the native compression tool in Windows. DO NOT compress the entire directory and DO NOT compress the latest log, plus the chk file. Only compress the old content. That will allow enough space to get database mounted and do an Exchange aware backup. If you attempt to manage the logs yourself, then it will cause problems with Exchange. Exchange should manage the logs. Another option would have been to enable circular logging, restart the information store and the logs would have been purged. Moving the logs manually basically meant those logs were close to useless anyway, so you wouldn't have lost anything. Simon.Simon Butler, Exchange MVP Blog | Exchange Resources | In the UK? Hire Me.

Thanks very much. Excellent advice and clears up a few things. Will know for next time...