SMB Exchange Administration Nightmare

I've said it before and I'll say it again: With services like Google Apps, and now whatever Microsoft's "Live" equivalent is called, why would any small business buy an Exchange server again?

A friend of mine who is the CFO and de facto Exchange admin for a small company recently sent this email to his friends:

I have a Microsoft Small Business Server (MS SBS 2003) server with a C: partition getting close to its capacity, when it does it will lock up since there will be no room to operate. 3.5 Gigs of the drives content are log files.

Question, can I cut and move these log files to another drive for archiving or will that disrupt the servers performance and operation? The majority of the log files are exchange logs going back over a year and it appears none have been accessed since created which gives me some suspicion they are not necessary and nothing more than a view of history if you need it. Anyone know if SBS Server has to have its log files to operate? Or does it just dump these log files out daily and expect someone to clean up after it?

Another friend, who is much more Microsoft-savvy than I, sent this response:

As simple as it sounds, it very well may be complicated:

The path less traveled- Remove unneeded log files manually

Almost all Exchange administrators know and live by the golden rule: "Do not remove Exchange log files manually!". Basically I agree. If you have any other course of action that may work for you when you lost all empty space on your system then use it before trying this one.

Here is some more info:
http://searchexchange.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid43_gci1187056,00.html

Ugh.

Comments

[Zoli Erdos]

Answer: remove Exchange Server manually.
Subscribe to Google Apps manually.

But you already know that ...

:-)

[Susan]

http://msmvps.com/blogs/bradley/archive/2008/03/25/so-who-needs-exchange-on-their-sbs-anymore-in-this-day-and-age-of-live-this-and-google-that.aspx

Run www.sbsbpa.com on that server. I think his backup is horked up as those Exchange logs should be autodeleting.

[Richard]

Not that his backup is horked, its that he is not using a backup program that is exchange aware or not even using a backup program. ;) He can always use ntbackup (to clean up the log files) first and then what ever backup program second.
He just needs to find a SBSC to manage his server :)