Growing Exchange Database size

First, let's use the correct terminology on what you are doing so the question can be understood clearly.

Archiving itself does nothing for the size of the message(s), it only makes a copy of the message(s) in the archive location.

Shortcutting is what replaces parts of the message with a stub in Exchange/Domino.

What are you shortcutting now and what time period are you using for the age of the messages to shortcut?

IFFI,

I agree the terminology needs to be corrected in order for someone to respond correctly.

However, the first point you make, "a growing Exchange 2010 database despite shortcutting attachments (assuming you meant you are shortcutting attachments, and you are not seeing the space being reclaimed as reusable White Space, but in stead the actual database file size is growing.)".

You should review this Microsoft Blog about how the maintenance routines have changed in Exchange 2010.  It is quite possible (and confirmed in my companies environment with a Microsoft case) that you will not automatically reclaim all the free space created by shortcutting mail items into stubs.  This is unfortunate and affects the archive products of Microsoft Partners such as EMC and Symantec.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2012/08/27/3516572.aspx

Keep in mind that shortcutting messages bodies preclude users from searching for them within outlook and creates a less than desirable user experience.

Shortcutting attachments along should reduce you mailstore between 40-70% depending on what you ratios of attachments are.

Message bodies themselves are typically vary small in the order of 20K each.

A good starting point for attachment shortcutting is anything older than 90 day.

From there you can adjust that to be more aggressive if you don't get the desired results.

If you get to aggressive users could be constantly retrieving shortcuts from the archive and taxing the system.

The final number depends totally on your users typical behave and is different in every environment.

Hello Gary. Thanks for your fast response.

I was actually refering to "Shortcutting". At the moment we are shortcutting Appointments, Email message, Meetings.

• Include Message body: True
• Dates for this Activity: Between 30 days and 2520 days.
• Message size filter: Include messages that are greater than 0KB.

My expectation is that the size of Message body within end-user Microsoft Outlook shrink to smaller size once shortcutting of the emails is done.

Hello, just came across this post.  We experienced the same thing on our Exchange 2010 databases.  The reason being was single item recovery was turned on for all mailboxes.  Basically, when SourceOne grabbed an attachment for archiving, Exchange saw this as a deletion and kept a copy in the dumpster.  This defeats the purpose of SourceOne as the Exchange databases were growing rapidly, so we had to turn off single item recovery.  Other archive vendors updated their software to address this, but I didn't see anything for SourceOne.  Does anyone know if EMC addressed this?  Thanks.

Greetings,

In case of legal hold or single item recovery isn’t that intended way how Exchange dumpster 2.0 will work? It would be interesting to see what other vendor updates you are referring to.

You can open service request with EMC support to find out more information on it if you want to keep “Single item recovery feature”. It would be interesting to see how MS allowed data to be deleted / modified from exchange/dumpster without even sending messages to Deletions/Purges/versions folders. If you will be able to provide reference to support in regard to how others are dealing with it, it would help them to drive it with engineering team.

Regards,

Rajan