Wednesday, September 27, 2017

Clear down Exchange 2016 Transaction Logs


During enterprise migrations to Exchange 2016 , Logfiles can grow very large and the role of an Exchange backup service becomes critical to clear down log files and ensure log file volumes do not run out of space.

Quite often businesses request bulk upload migrations are performed outside business hours, the problem with this is that backups run at the same time as bulk uploads and then prevents the backup program from truncating log files.

Circular logging is not an option when there Exchange is hosting a DAG.

These simple commands can trick Exchange into thinking a full backup has been performed and then Exchange will take care of truncating the logs and not cause any corruption to databases.

  1. Log on to Exchange server that hosts the volume running low on space
  2. Launch a command prompt with elevated privilages
  3. Type : Diskshadow and press enter

    ####Browse to the root of the volume, NTFS mount points are fine, the following command mounts DBVolume1
  4. Add volume C:\-Exchange-Disks\DBVolume1
  5.  Begin backup and press enter
  6. Create and press enter
  7. End backup and press enter
Exchange will then truncate the logs