We have been running up against the 16Gb database size limit in Exchange 2000. We then moved off quite a bit of e-mail to pst files and then ran eseutil /d to compact the database, except the database size still shows at 16Gb. If you added up the size of each individual mailbox it would be under 4 Gb. Why hasn't the size of priv1.edb gone down? TIA

The usual culprit is Deleted Item Retention on Exchange. Although messages have been archived or deleted from the user's mailbox and the Deleted Items folder emptied, the messages will hang around in the database until your Deleted Item retention period has expired and Online Maintenance runs to mark those database pages as whitespace. After Online Maintenance has run, check the server's Application event log for Event ID 1221. This event details the actual size of the whitespace region of the database file - if the figures reported here are not particularly large, an offline defrag will still give you virtually no wriggle room. In this case, lower your deleted item retention period to 0 days and allow Online Maintenance to run. Databases pages should be freed, event 1221 should log a significantly larger amount of whitespace and an offline defrag should recover this space as expected. Don't forget to increase your deleted item retention period again after this is completed. In Exchange 2000, should you need it in a dire emergency, you can increase the database capacity by 1GB as per http://support.microsoft.com/kb/813051 . Don't rely on this long term though - if you have to push the database size, you should be doing something fast to get matters resolved. Also, remember the "database size" is calculated on the SUM of the size of the EDB and STM files for the mail store. Exchange 2000 uses their physical size on disk - rather than logical size (physical size minus whitespace) - so an Offline Defrag is required to get you back below the limit. Matt

On Wed, 7 Apr 2010 21:11:33 +0000, paydirt wrote:>>>We have been running up against the 16Gb database size limit in Exchange 2000. We then moved off quite a bit of e-mail to pst files and then ran eseutil /d to compact the database, except the database size still shows at 16Gb. If you added up the size of each individual mailbox it would be under 4 Gb. Why hasn't the size of priv1.edb gone down? Deleted Item Retention. You may have remove the content for view, butit's still in the database awaiting its expiry date.Set the expiry to 0 days and wait for the scheduled maintenance toexpire the data and convert it to free space.Oh, and make sure you make a full ("normal") backup after that -- justin case you have the box checked to not delete stuff until after sucha backup is completed successfully. :-)---Rich MatheisenMCSE+I, Exchange MVP--- Rich Matheisen MCSE+I, Exchange MVP