Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of lvcg
lvcg

asked on

Exchange maintenance

I need to shrink the data store in exchange 2003 on SBS 2003 with exchange service pack 2.
They drive is full and I know users have junk in their mailboxes. what is the quickest way to clean this up and free up a couple of gigs..
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of Hypercat (Deb)
Hypercat (Deb)
Flag of United States of America image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
>>the mailbox management processes should take care of shrinking the database automatically.

The only thing that will make the database files actually smaller is an offline defrag.

Good maintenance can stop them from growing, but will not shrink them.

To quickly shrink the mailbox store, I would be be archiving things out as mentioned above.  Get a hold of exmerge, and get it to export all messages older than a certain date, then get exmerge to purge those messages out totally - set your deleted item retention to zero days, wait for the mailbox management process to run (or run it manually if you are impatient) and then do an offline defrag.

Bear in mind that an offline defrag is going to take a long time depending on the size of your databases (and you will need a heap of free space (210%) to get it to run)

Short answer, there is no way to quickly shrink a database store.  Move it to another drive would be the quickest solution.

-red
Avatar of MATTHEW_L
MATTHEW_L

You could force them to clean out their mailboxes.  Try a recipiant policy for mailbox manager settings.  Delete all emails in deleted items and junk email.  You could do size / date ranges.