Priv.edb much too large compared to total mailboxes

[Flipper01]

Customer has following problem (exch 5.0) :
Priv.edb size has growed in one week from +/- 2.5 GB to +/- 13 GB (average priv.edb grow rate : 60 MB/Hour).
Possible cause seems to be a mail loop, activated by a user by setting an "out of the office" rule to forward his incoming mail to another external mailbox.
Receiving mailbox was sending an autoreply to his original forwarding mailbox, thus causing a mail loop.
The rule has been removed, and the database stopped growing.
All obsolete mails from mail loop have been removed from user's mailbox.
User's mailbox shrinked from 2.09 GB to 64 MB.
Afterwards an offline defrag has been run to reduce the size of the priv.edb. We only gained the size corresponding to the deleted mails from the mail loop. The priv.edb size is still 11.8 GB big. The total size of the mailboxes now corresponds to the original priv.edb size (+/- 2.5 GB)
Problem is were to locate the remaining priv.edb database occupation : 11.8 GB - 2.5 GB = 9.4 GB ?
No changes to the exchange configuration have been made inbetween.

 

[jonarden]

Have you checked Total K for each mailbox in Mailbox Resources in the Private Information Store (ordered by size of mailbox)? It will show which users have the largest mailboxes, which may be a place to start.

 

[Flipper01]

Hi, thanks for your reply.

The first thing we checked was the total size of the individual mailboxes.
Total size of all individual mailboxes equals +/- 2.5 GB
What I would like to know, is where to start looking for the difference between the total size of the mailboxes and the total size of the of the priv.edb, which is now 11.8 GB.
Are there some pointers or fractions remaining in the database somewhere related to the mail loop problem ?

 

[SINFL]

I to am having a very similar problem, in fact it is almost identical to the one you are having. My total Mailbox size for all users should be around 18GB and my priv.edb is 34.5 and growing weekly. A few months ago I tried the ESEUTIL out of desperation and it seemed to hose the Exchange server up. I may have been doing a wrong step or two but could not get it to work right.
If someone who has been through this could shed some light on this issue it would be great. I will be proforming the Moving Exchange to another server role here soon and do not feel that this will fix the size, more just the hardware.

I'm very glad to have found this site. The info and knowledge here is outstanding, hands down.

 

[jonarden]

What is the size of the pub.edb database (public folders)?

 

[Zelandakh]

what is in the private store event log id 1221?

what backup solution and have you got flush committed transaction logs?

 

[Flipper01]

Hi Zelandakh,

I need to check the content of the log id 1221.
I will contact the customer.

About the backup solution the customer is running :

Veritas v 8.5 and flush committed transaction logs is activated in the backup job.

The size of the pub.edb is very small, since the customer is
not using it (do not know exactly the size).

 

[SINFL]

Jonarden,
I'm not sure who you were asking for the info.
My Priv.edb is 34.5GB
My Pub.edb is 607MB
My Dir.edb is 577MB

My Backup is NT Backup. I do normal Online every night during the week, and once a month a Full offline.
I have the users set to 38MB mailbox sizes.
From looking at the EXMERGE all mailboxes should be just below 19GB.