Exchange - Enabling Mailbox Auditing Storage Consumption - Part 2

In my previous post I showed you how enable mailbox auditing by mailbox type. Some Exchange admins are wary of enabling auditing for all mailboxes because of storage space concerns. But, the good news is: even on a huge mailbox with lots of activity, the space consumed is miniscule.

From my experience, Mailbox Auditing adds less than 1% of mailbox size. Which means it's totally safe to enable it on all mailboxes in your organization. Plus, disks are cheap...just add more!

The following mailbox is 91GB (why she has a mailbox that gargantuan I don't know. At that point, I bet she can't even find what she's looking for).

As you can see, the Audits folder size is very little, and I have the "-AuditOwner SoftDelete, HardDelete" options set on her mailbox.

Get-Mailbox "Christiane G" | Get-MailboxFolderStatistics -FolderScope RecoveraleItems | fl name,foldersize

Name       : Recoverable Items
FolderSize : 0 B (0 bytes)

Name       : Audits
FolderSize : 143.94 KB (44,994 bytes)

Name       : Calendar Logging
FolderSize : 3.678 MB (3,856,561 bytes)

Name       : Deletions
FolderSize : 273.4 MB (286,645,304 bytes)

Name       : Purges
FolderSize : 0 B (0 bytes)

Name       : Versions
FolderSize : 0 B (0 bytes)

**Note** If you don't see an Audits folder right away, it just means that the owner/admin/delegate hasn't done anything according to your -AuditOwner/Admin/Delegate settings in the mailbox yet. Give it time and once some modification happens, it will create that folder

So, auditing won't kill your Database storage, go ahead an enable it and make your life easier!

In the next post, I'll show you how to create a scheduled task to automatically enable auditing on newly created mailboxes.