Exchange 2010: Dupster growing when archiving calendar elements

[Simon_B_]

Hi folks,

we are currently having an issue with one customer where only a few mailboxes seem to be affected by a strange issue: When archiving from these mailboxes the "TotalDeletedItemSize" strats growing. The amount of growth even exceeds the amount of data archived by several magnitudes (several GB per scheduled archiving run)

After 

Environment: Exchange 2010 SP2 RU3 with EV 9.0.2

Troubleshooting performed/insight gained:

• The issue does only occur if IPM.Schedule and IPM.Appointment are selected for archiving (which is the case for all mailboxes - not only the affected). If deactivating these message classes the issue does not occur
• The Mailboxes were moved to a new Exchange DB - the issue immediatly started to show there too
• Exchange 2010 Single Item Recovery is not activated
• When having a look at the "Recoverable Items" Folder with MFCMAPI over 1,8 million items are shown for one mailbox we have troubleshooted
• There are no Outlook rules in place which could lead to this kind of behavior
• We started seeing this issue after migrating to Exchange 2010
• DeleteNonShortcutItems is set to off
• Strip Attachment to non shortcut items: off

Any further ideas what the reason for that might be?

[Rob_Wilcox1]

Is there anything special about the items?  Are they large?  Do they have attachments?  Are they recurring?

Is there anything else environmentally which is different for the users that this affecting?  Do they use PDA's, Outlook Web Access, Blackberry, etc?

[Jeff_Shotton]

Try and get a dtrace of the archivingtask during the time when this is happening and checking to see if some sort of looping condition is occurring when passing over these items.

Also, are you seeing a large number of items archived from the calendar folders in, say, archive explorer? Are there duplicates in there?

Regards,

Jeff

[KarlW · Accepted solution]

This is most likely to do with Calendar repair.  See the following articles.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2012/06/01/holy-cow-changes-to-recoverable-items-version...

http://www.msexchange.org/articles_tutorials/exchange-server-2010/management-administration/exchange...

http://www.msexchange.org/articles_tutorials/exchange-server-2010/management-administration/exchange...

In Exchange 2010 it can be disabled at a mailbox level (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee633473.aspx),  I haven't had a chance to check if this stops the logging to the recoverable items or not as the help is unclear.

Unfortunately it would appear the new attribute 'CalendarLoggingQuota' is only available in Exchange 2013.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb123981(v=exchg.150).aspx

Thanks
Karl

[Simon_B_]

Hi KarlW, 

thanks for your links! This is indeed a possible scenario for the behavior we are seeing. I will read through them and perform further tests.