If you are wondering how much size of your mailboxes is taken by the “Recoverable Items” folder, you can use PowerShell to get this information.
By using the Get-MailboxFolderStatistics cmdlet for any mailbox, you will see there are 4 special folders under Recoverable Items:
Get-MailboxFolderStatistics nuno –FolderScope RecoverableItems | Select Identity, FolderAndSubfolderSize
Identity FolderAndSubfolderSize
-------- ----------------------
nuno\Recoverable Items 254.3 MB (266,605,077 bytes)
nuno\Audits 0 B (0 bytes)
nuno\Deletions 27.72 MB (29,065,759 bytes)
nuno\Purges 3.21 KB (3,287 bytes)
nuno\Versions 150.5 MB (157,785,542 bytes)
Obviously we are interested in the top one, so we need to filter the cmdlet to only return that one. Because we want every mailbox in a particular database, we need to check this folder for every single mailbox (don’t forget to update the name of the database you want to check!):
[Int] $total = 0
(Get-Mailbox -Database MDB16 -ResultSize Unlimited) | ForEach {$total += (Get-MailboxFolderStatistics $_ -FolderScope RecoverableItems | ? {$_.Identity -match “Recoverable Items”}).FolderAndSubfolderSize.ToMB()}
$total
The end result will show you how much space (in MBs) is currently taken on a database by the Recoverable Items folder.
