Can I stop eseutil when running offline defragmentation

no, i'd rather wait if you have no backup before defrag.

do you see cpu usage and disk activity?
25gb will take quite a while, give it enough time. (could be overnight)

What happens when you run the offline deframentation is the database is copied to a temp location, and once done it will be copied over the original.

If you stop it, the temp database is left rather than deleted. It is possible to stop it, but is not recommended.
If you do stop it, you will need to locate the temp database and delete it to free up the space it's taking.

Hope this helps!

:o)

Bartender_1

As you should not be doing an offline defrag on the original databases anyway, stopping it should not be an issue.

For 25 GB, be fully prepared for it to take up to 25 hours

-red

Thank you for all inputs. After studying it, I took Red's advice and stopped it. After mounting the store, the email works fine.

1. I am doming the backup. Is the priv1.stm the temp? Should I delete it after backup?
2. "As you should not be doing an offline defrag on the original databases anyway". If I should not do offline defrag, what should I do?

Again thank you.

1. NO!  stm is the streaming file, and contains emails (if i remember correctly, these are certain types, like external mails, or something)
2. Why are you doing an offline defrag in the first place?  There are only a very few reasons to do it.

-red

I find the temp files. they are in bin fodler.

Hmmmm ... this doesnt bode well for me then ...

I've been processing my 200GB mail store overnight and now i have to tell the business that there will be an estimated further 4 hours of down time.

There is a reason that MS recommend smaller databases - given the size of that database, you really should have split it up among numerous databases.  Also, without knowing how the process is going, i think 4 hours would be conservative, considering you can't really tell how much longer it is going to take.

The real question would be, why on earth would you do an offline defrag of a 200gb database anyway?  If it _must_ be done, which I sincerely doubt, just create a new mailbox store and move your mailboxes over - zero downtime, same results.

Good point,

I was advised by the company that support us (a Microsoft partner) that that this would reduce the size of the database as we had a looping problem with 12 emails stuck in a queue and this seemed to be what was causing the problem.

I have spoken to Microsoft about this directly and they inform me that they will get their support guys to come on and have a look within the next 2 hours or so.

Total defrag time for the 200GB was 24 hours (give or take half an hour) and due to resourcing limitations we had to do this using a temp database path on the other side of the network.

I'm as you can imagine not happy with the advice given by the supporting partner company and not being a server admin myself couldn't really have said otherwise.

I'll feedback the info that the MS guys give and ask them about stopping eseutil.exe too.

by the way ... our account list is only for about 20 people at the moment so there is most definately not 200GB of mail in that store !!!

I did a bit of investigation before taking the service down and due to the nature of the business we do here it is quite big but still only accounts for about 25GB of actual data, nothing like the 200GB seen here.

Microsoft Partners are by no means an authority - Most of the work I, as well as other experts on this site do is clean up their messes.  Sorry you had such a crap experience, just learn from it and sack them - if you really need outside help that you can't handle internal, bite the bullet and call MS straight away.

Moving right along, what version of exchange do you have?