Exchange Log File Help

Hi, quick question please...

We are set up on an Exchange 2000 server and all of the sudden we have log files named e*****.log that are being generated constantly and are 5MB or so each. This only started occuring over the weekend whereas previously there were only 4 or 5 files that were named as such.

They are located in the MBDATA directory. I read something about circular logging being enabled or disabled, but can anyone shed some more light into this please ??

They are taking up a ton of room very quickly.

Thank you,
Murph

Did your backups stop?

I have seen the logs start to grow because the backups were failing and the transaction logs were not being purged until a good backup was completed...
Once a good backup happened the bit was cleared and logs were rotated.

Exchange is a transaction based messaging system. It writes new transactions in 4kb pages into memory. Thus the database is never truly in sync. while exchange is running. These are called "dirty" pages, and are only written to disk (information store) when exchange is stopped and the pages are flushed.

You can imagine what would happen if a sudden power loss was to occur. All the inconsistent "dirty" pages would be lost. Thus, data would be lost. In order to maintain integrity, all transactions are written to a transaction log. i.e. edbxxx1.log. Once a log reaches 5 MB it rolls over to the next edbxxx2.log, and continues. This is how exchange mitigates failures. Many people treat the transactions logs, as more important than the information store itself.

-Quad