Database Defragmentation

[dechnoz]

On my Exchange Server I'm running out of room. I have about 600 meg left on the data drives. I had the users archive and delete their e-mails, and in Exchange administrator I can see thet the individual mail boxes have decreased in size by a couple of gigs. However, the available space on the disk still remains at about 600 megs. I understand that that the private info store data base needs to be compacted and that you would do this with edbutil.exe. I am planning on copying the priv.edb to another server in order to do this because edbutil.exe requires that I have available disk space equal to the size of the database, and I don't have that much space left.
I have been reading up on all of this but I am still confused about a couple of things.
(1) Is edbutil the correct exe to use or should I use eseutil.exe?
(2) Do I need to run Isinteg after the defrag?
Could anyone out there outline the procedure for doing all this as it is my first time and would prefer not screwing this up.
Thanks for any help...
Dale Echnoz

 

[alicep]

I ran into similar questions.

To do an offline defrag, use edbutil. Microsoft Knowledge base articles I found helpful:
Q143233 - XADM: Command Line Parameters for Edbutil.exe
Q164379 Run Edbutil across the network when priv.edb gets too big
Q166869: edbutil Uses Exchange Bin directory for tempdfrg.edb

I did run isinteg after the defrag. It found errors the first time through, so I repeated isinteg again to verify the errors were fixed and it reported 0 warnings and 0 errors.

I don't recall exactly why at the moment, but I ran MTACHECK prior to doing the defrag.
Q163326 XCON: How and Why to Run Mtacheck.

 

[dechnoz]

Thanks for the help, I did the defragmentation over the weekend, and got 3 gigabytes back. One thing though, I used eseutil.exe instead of edbutil. It seems that eseutil is the successor to edbutil.
Anyway, thanks for the help!