Exchange Server Full!

I was asked to assist with an all too common occurrence; a full Exchange server drive. Exchange has to be one of the most frustrating and misunderstood of Microsoft’s products. In spite of having quite a bit of experience with exchange this problem nearly knocked me of my perch. Smart money would be on adding some hard drive space. In this case it was not an option. Shifting the streaming files and pub stores freed up enough to get it running.  A defrag is what was needed.  Here is where I came unstuck. A 250Gb USB drive was connected (formatted in NTFS as FAT32 only allows 4Gb files) and launched eseutil /d. Nine hours later there was no difference in size. In spite of the customer having a jolly good cleanup the retention policy was preventing the space being freed up. So either change the retention policy to zero or wait the set number of days. Next you need to run the cleanup wizard. Then run the eseutil / d. Good Luck, you’ll need it.