Do you have to use EDBUTIL on an Exchange server?

[MrMMills]

1-27-03
My users email alot of pdf, MS Word, and HTML documents as attachments. We are required to keep them and not detach them. As a result the Exchange database (pub.edb and priv.edb) was getting huge. In Exchange 5.5 I set my users mailbox settings to stay under 500MB and then they archive old email to a pst file on the file server. This has been great in keeping the the mail server more responsive and less of a chance of JetAdmin database corruption.

However the .pst files are very defragmented on my file server. Some have maxed out at 2GB per user, so new .pst files were created for the users. A traditional Server defrag won't defrag a pst file. (neither will Diskkeeper)

EDBUTIL will defrag a pst file BUT do I have to do it on that exchange server? Can I move the large pst files to another workstation and defrag them there instead of shutting down my Exchange server services to do this in offline mode?

Any help would be appreciated,
Thanks,
MrMMills

 

[lardum]

.PST files should be treated as normal files by any defrag utility. They are stand-alone files and not at all bound to Exchange only.

You can compact the .PST files to reduce the size of the file, this is done in Outlook where you add the PST file. Then you have to run a defrag utility if you want the disk where the .PST files are, defragged.