Enable circular logging in Exchange 2007

Enabling or disabling circular logging in Exchange 2007 is a pretty easy task, though it is important to first understand what circular logging entails.  We know from previous lessons that the transaction logs will continue to grow as email continues to flow into the mailbox database.  In certain situations however, it may be desirable to enable circular logging in order to save on some disk space.  This is easily achieved by enabling circular logging, which will see the log files overwritten once they have been committed to the database.

Of course, the downside is that should the disk drive holding the databases crash, it would not be possible to recover up to the moment of failure from the use of transaction logs alone.  In such a scenario, the only option would be to recovery from the latest database backup.  For this reason, circular logging is disabled on Exchange by default.

Circular logging in Exchange 2007 can be enabled from within the Exchange Management Console. Simply right-click on the appropriate storage group and go to properties.  There is a checkbox titled “Enable Circular Logging” that can be found within the properties dialog box. Select the checkbox, click on “Ok” and circular logging is now enabled.