File copying takes to long

One of my production volumes has been running desperately low on disk space. This is happen far too often so I've decided to just go ahead and use some space on the SAN to put this large amount of data. The space I'm using is space that I am not a real huge fan of b/c it consists of Parallel ATA drive running at 5400rpm. Yes these are not even SATA drives. Anyway it's 2.5TB of unused space that I am copying the data to right now.

The data is coming from internal SCSI disks on the server that are 10Krpm and total 1.7TB of space. There is only 30GB available. So As you can see I gotta do what I gotta do. I started the data copy on Tuesday at 1pm EST. It's is now as you can see from the time of this post Friday 9am EST and it's copied 1TB so far. The server is connected to the SAN via HBA's set to 2GB Data rate. Pretty fast but the copy could have been far ahead if certain users didn't take ownership of a bunch of files tripping domain Administrator from the permissions. I get in on Thursday morning to find the script hanging for 30secs (the retry time)on every file in a specific folder. So I then have to manually change them and readd domain Admin back to the permissions. Who know how long the script was on these certain files. At that point 400GB's were copied. This morning it's 1 TB so I'd say that hold up cost me 200GB of data not being copied. Anyway I have 700GB's to go. So I'd say some time Saturday it will be done.

But wait! The script is set to check for changes at the source and run again. So it should update the destination. I'll have a test folder set at the very end of the source and modify the file inside accordingly to see if the destination get the update. I am using Robocopy version XP010 BTW.

Well couldn't I just restore from tape? Yeah but I need to run my backups this weekend and don't want to tie up my tape library for a few days restoring data. plus the restore will be from tapes that is a week old and I'd have to run some kind of sync software anyway. I therefore an potentially killing two birds with one stone doing it this way.

Exchange mailbox management

So this month we are go to start automatically deleting emails older than X days from our exchange server using Exchange 2003's build in Mailbox Manager. From my test it seems to work well in report mode. It generates a nice report that is sent to the Administrators mailbox (or any mailbox you'd like) listed below. This is the general, it's a sum of all the messages that would be deleted and the amount of space I would potentially get back. I ran the test on a portion of my userbase.

The email sent to the Admin mailbox;

The Microsoft Exchange Server Mailbox Manager has completed processing mailboxes
Started at: 2006-09-05 09:25:48
Stopped at: 2006-09-05 09:35:49
Mailboxes processed: 113
Messages that would be moved or deleted: 110803
Size of messages that would be moved or deleted: 12381.03 MB

Here is what is inside the report;

Cleaning Mailbox user@company.com
Recipient Policy: purge test
Folder Deleted Items Contents: 126 Items (8.37 MB)
Folder Deleted Items Contents: 126 Items (8.37 MB)
Folder Deleted Items Done: 0 Items Processed, 0 Items Would Be Moved or Deleted (0 (null))
Folder / Contents: 0 Items (1.00 KB)
Folder / Contents: 0 Items (1.00 KB)
Folder / Done: 0 Items Processed, 0 Items Would Be Moved or Deleted (0 (null))
Folder /Inbox Contents: 433 Items (328.14 MB)
Folder /Inbox Contents: 433 Items (328.14 MB)
Folder /Inbox Done: 0 Items Processed, 295 Items Would Be Moved or Deleted (77093 (null))
Folder /Outbox Contents: 0 Items (0.00 KB)
Folder /Outbox Contents: 0 Items (0.00 KB)
Folder /Outbox Done: 0 Items Processed, 0 Items Would Be Moved or Deleted (0 (null))
Folder /Sent Items Contents: 18 Items (1.37 MB)
Folder /Sent Items Contents: 18 Items (1.37 MB)
Folder /Sent Items Done: 0 Items Processed, 0 Items Would Be Moved or Deleted (0 (null))
Mailbox user@company.com Contents (before processing): 577 Items (337.88 MB)
Mailbox user@company.com Done: 5 Folders Processed, 295 Items Would Be Moved Or Deleted (77093 (null))

We are doing this b/c for the life of me I'm don't know why people still won't clean up their mailboxes. Even after countless email notifications, howto's instructions on our intranet and even mailbox limits the users still have 200+mb mailboxes. So we are going to automate this process.

When I was originally looking to set this up I went to Micosoft's website and didn't find a thing. I ended up at Msexchange.org they have a very nice write up on how to do this. What I manged to find on Microsoft's site is how to exclude users from this process.