Exchange 2003 transaction log files filling up very quickly


I haven’t blogged about any IT-related issues in a while, and I thought that the solution to this little-known exchange 2003 problem would probably interest the SysAdmin crowd among you guys.
If one day, you log into your inbox and find an email waiting for you announcing that the disk containing your exchange 2003 transaction log files has almost no more disk space, you may be experiencing the following issue.

As I’m sure you’re aware, the E00*.log files located in your \exchsrvr\MDBDATA are transaction logs containing everything that happened to your Information Store since it was last backed up. As soon as you perform a backup of the store using an exchange-aware agent, the log files will be cleared. However, in this particular situation, the transaction files are filling up the drive too quickly and will consume all of the remaining disk space before you have the time to back up your store.
In this case, you may want to check out your Outlook 2007 clients that have the “exchange cache mode” option enabled. The station that causes the problem will probably have a large number of “sync issues” in the Outlook folder of the same name. I’m not sure of this though. The client who was causing the issue happened to have this problem. Can anyone confirm this? After locating the rogue workstation, the only thing you have to do to fix the problem is to disable the “exchange cache mode”. If you want to re-enable it after, be sure to delete the old OST file and have Outlook create a new one.
But after fixing the issue, your disk will likely still be out of space, so you’ll need to clear those log files before mounting the exchange store again.
WARNING: NEVER, EVER delete the E00 log files manually. The proper way to remove them in this situation is:
1- Make a full backup of your exchange store using an exchange-aware agent.
2- Enable Circular logging. (Don’t forget to disable the option and restart the information store service after you get your disk space back)
Voilà! Now if your Exchange transaction log files folder start filling very quickly, this little tutorial will give you an extra thing to check for to solve your problem!

Print this post

0 comments: