Did you ever think about why there is a requirement to compact NSF file when the Lotus Notes is working properly? Most of the organizations adopt Lotus Notes email client and saves their clients, employees’ database in the NSF file format (default file format of IBM Notes). As we know Lotus Notes is an All-in-One platform that handles and performs sending/receiving of all tasks such as emails, contacts, calendars, personal journals, task lists, etc. In an enterprise number of employees works, therefore, the size of their corresponding NSF mailbox file can exceed due to the huge amount of emails, attachments, and other respective data items that make the NSF file corrupt and inaccessible. To come out from this pathetic situation, either you have to perform a process to compact NSF file to remove this scenario or you have to Convert Lotus Notes to Outlook to access the same data in Outlook Platform. Whenever the size limit of the NSF mailbox file has exceeded an error message displays on the screen: “Warning, database has exceeded its size warning threshold”.
The main purpose of displaying this message on the screen is to let the organizations know about the Lotus Notes data file size limit and hence, reduce or compress the size of the NSF file. If the officials of the organization ignore the error then they will get one more error surely after few days as “Cannot allocate database object, the database would exceed its disk quota”.
Reasons for exceeding the size of Lotus Notes NSF file
In an enterprise, there are several reasons that are responsible to enlarge the size of the NSF database file and make it unallocated for the Domino/Lotus Notes email client.
- Availability of huge amounts of unnecessary or duplicate emails.
- Presence of large attachments in important or redundant emails.
- Excess of soft-deleted or trashed data items.
- An abundance of unnecessary drafted messages.
- Large Graphics elements in mailbox data items.
All these factors contribute to an NSF file to increase the size quota of Lotus Notes database file.
Simple Techniques to compress Lotus Notes files to compact the NSF file
- Using Lotus Notes Client.
- Using the Domino Server.
- Using the Domino Console.
Method-1: Compact Lotus Notes NSF file using Notes client-
- Step-1: Open IBM Lotus Notes (version 9.0) email client in the machine.
- Step-2: Click on the File menu and go to the Properties (alt+Enter) option.
- Step-3: From the next wizard choose the Database option from the drop-down list.
- Step-4: Go to the i (info) tab to get the size information about the NSF mailbox file.
- Step-5: Click on the Compact button to reduce the Lotus Notes database file size.
Method-2: Compact NSF file with Domino server-
- Step-1: Open Domino Server in the machine to conduct the process.
- Step-2: Go to Server/Program option.
- Step-3: Choose the Configuration Folders option and then click on the Add Program button.
- Step-4: Provide the complete details about the mailbox file in their respective fields.
- Step-5: In the last click on Save and Close button to initialize the program.
Read More: Make Rules to avoid the process to Compress Lotus Notes data file
Method-3: Use the Domino Console to compress the Lotus Notes file size-
- Step-1: Open Domino server console window.
- Step-2: Run the following command- load Fixup –f database.nsf and wait till the completion finishes.
- Step-3: Now run this command- load Compact-B database.nsf and wait till the process end.
- Step-4: Run the command- load Compact –c database.nsf and wait to finish the process.
This Console command method will help to compact NSF file if the size of the Lotus Notes mailbox file increases abnormally.
Final Words:
The error mainly comes with the large NSF data files. In order to avoid the NSF file corruption, the need for processing to compact NSF file is an essential step to compress Lotus Notes NSF mailbox file. It keeps the NSF file free from any error or issue. In this article, we explained all possible steps to approach the process to reduce the file size and compress the NSF file without any hassle.