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THEarle

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Why is my exchange store still growing?

We have an Exchange 2003 Standard Edition email store that is rapidly growing out of control.  When we turned up the store in April of 2009 the store was 30Gb and it is now 70Gb.  Starting in January of 2010 we began to place quotas and group policies in place to delete unneeded emails and archive good ones.  We have been monitoring event id 1221 for 6 months and have maintained over 5Gb of free space within the store.  In the last 6 months the store size went from 64Gb to 70Gb. Why is the size of the exchange store still growing with so much free space inside the store?
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Shabarinath TR
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Also, see if online de-fragmentation is happening daily with out errors.
Thanks
Shaba
What antivirus / email scanner are you using ?
Event ID 1221 is related to online system maintenance.

http://www.amset.info/exchange/event1221.asp
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check this article which explains reasons for exchange database growing fast and how to troubleshoot it

http://exchangeserverinfo.com/2007/06/23/fast-growing-databases--transaction-logs-on-exchange-2000--2003.aspx
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THEarle

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The store size from ESM is as follows:
Mail = 37Gb
Deleted = 31Gb
White space = 10Gb
Actual Store size = EDB = 47.1Gb, stm = 26.6, public < 1Gb
Online defrag runs every night without error.
I an using Trend Micro WFB advanced (6.0) for AV.

Can you exclude scanning of Exchange Folder from Trendmicro WFBS.

WFBS 6.0 SP2 is released. you might consider upgrading.
http://esupport.trendmicro.com/Pages/System-requirements-for-Worry-Free-Business-Security-WFBS-60-Service-Pack-2.aspx

Coming back to the original issue:
a) Check eventvwr logs for warning / errors.
b) How to find what is causing database growth:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555360

c) It will be a good idea to do an offline defrag.
d) what's your delete items retention policy ? 30 days or more ?
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Thank you so much for your help. As Shaba pointed out the deleted email space is what was preveting the logical store size from shrinking.  The policy was set to keep deleted emails for 120 days. I have changed this back to 30 days and will monitor the size over the next week.  Thanks to sunnyc7 for the link to that excellent write up by demazter, since disk space is not an issue on this new server, I agree that an offline defrag is not recommended. Thanks again.