Exchange Server Woes

We are a very small company. Many companies at our size do not have servers because they can not afford a dedicated system administrator. But we are different. I got my MCSE 10 years ago, and I thoroughly understand TCP/IP network.

The Exchange server is a core part of the network - the place we archive all e-mails and important documents. The search facility in outlook (the Advanced Search) is fantastic for searching emails and binary files.

Since we are a small company, after we set up the server we have not backed it up once. At that time, we felt that e-mails archives are not quite important, and we can always recover the loss if needed. Today, we have a different view - because we have so many e-mails and documents managed by Exchange.

I noticed that the Exchange server eats disk space very quickly. The hard disk that the exchange server occupies has a capacity of 80GB. When it was installed, it has plenty of space (about 70G). Today we are surprised to learn that there are only 20GB spare space left. I noticed that there are virtually thousands of log files under the MDBDATA folder.

After reading several pages of a book, and reading numerous web pages, I finanlly work out a solution. There is a flag called "enable circular loggin" that you can turn on. In this mode Exchange server will reuse a log file over and over again. The down side is that you can no longer perform differential backup. But hay, a full backup turned out to be only 1.5G for us. We can certainly afford doing full backups every day.