(or, why Exchange Server may ruin my life, that bastard program.)
Actually, the massive file that I’m copying at the moment is the same one that I was copying a couple of days ago.
Here’s the situation. My company uses Exchange for e-mail and calendar and all of that kind of stuff. I think it’s a mistake, but no one asked me. And I have to deal with it, regardless.
Here’s the thing with Exchange. It has these things called “mailstores.” They are, as one would expect, databases that hold mail. Specifically, they are massive, nay monolithic, databases, which hold incredible amounts of mail. They do all sorts of wonderful things with indexing and searching and everything else, allowing quick access to anything you could want.
(I’m going to ignore, for the moment, the fact that Cyrus does everything that Exchange does, does it better, and does it for free. Because if I didn’t ignore it I would begin to rant.)
In any case, Exchange has this funny little bug.
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you have two mailstores. Let’s call them StoreA and StoreB. And let’s say that you have a mailbox in StoreA. Let’s say that before doing anything, StoreA (or, more properly, the database that holds StoreA) takes up 20 Gigabytes of the disk. And StoreB, or rather the database that holds it (which is called StoreB.edb), takes up 0 Gigabytes. No space at all.
Now, lets say you move the mailbox in StoreA to StoreB. Due to the wonders of Exchange, StoreA still takes up 20 Gigabytes. But now StoreB also takes up 20 Gigabytes. The mailbox that used to reside in StoreA now resides in StoreB, but it takes up it’s full space in both.
Dumb. I fucking hate Exchange.
If you move that mailbox to StoreB, the contents of the mailbox are added to StoreB. And the size of StoreB increases by some amount, roughly equivalent to what you put into it.
But the size of StoreA doesn’t go down.
Now, lets say that the disk that holds StoreA and StoreB is, oh, 36 Gigabytes. Now, 20 Gigabytes plus 20 Gigabytes rather plainly adds up to more than 36 Gigabytes. This is bad. Unless you do something called “defragmenting” the database.
Which is a pain in the ass, takes a lot of time, and involves copying mail folders at (now) 3:30 AM.
pthpt.