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Currently looking at cleaning up a mess left by a now-gone tech for one of my clients. Initially we found that backups hadn't been running for some months. While they're running now, I just found out that Exchange backups haven't. Exchange has been creating a lot of log files, which were moved off onto a NAS in order to keep Exchange 2010 running. Long story short, we'll be getting a new SAN and a better backup solution in the upcoming months, but for now I need to find a way of truncating these log files.

I'm looking at enabling circular logging for Exchange 2010. My plan is to enable this option, and then do NTBackup to a NAS device until I'm OKed the hardware I need. Question is; does Exchange need access to all of the previous log files that haven't been flushed in order to enable circular logging? This can be done, but will require downtime to move the mount point to the NAS drive.

Also, what's the period of log files kept on-hand with circular logging? Day, week, specific size?

Thanks in advance for any answers,

Insomnia
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Enabling Circular Logging with Exchange 2010 is leaving yourself open to potential problems in the future unless you have at least one active and two passive copies of your databases. If for some reason your databases came into a failed state and needed logs that were overwritten, and you had no other databases that had those transactions committed, you would have some big problems. Did you verify what logs were committed to the databases before moving the logs off to a NAS?

To answer your specific question, I believe you only need access to the logs that have not yet been committed to the databases to enable circular logging. Check out the following article for some more insight: Exchange 2010 Circular Logging

HostBits
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  • Thanks for the response. Just read the link you sent me, gave me a good idea of what circular logging is. I honestly can't say whether all of the logs were committed or not as I didn't do the work. However, I expect the answer is yes, since only older logs were moved. I see what you mean about possible issues of going forward with circular logging. Problem right now is the logs, as long as I can throw away all of the old ones, I may be able to go with a Backup Exec job to the NAS. – Insomnia Mar 07 '13 at 20:55
  • For future generations, to figure out how many logs haven't been committed: Use perfmon, MSExchange Database ==> Instances, Log Generation Checkpoint Depth. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/exchange2010/thread/7aaddd4b-ec85-4534-ae9d-82b927f6bcc4/ – Insomnia Mar 07 '13 at 21:04