Exmerge and 5.5

[GBorrer]

Last week we ran the Exmerge util to dump all sent and deleted items out of our exchange store to help reduce overall size of the Data base. After this we also ran the Eseutil to defrag the system. We removed almost 3 Gig of infor with Exmerge but noticed only a 200 meg reduction in the size of the edb after running eseutil.

Can anyone explain why we are not reclaiming our size?

 

[gmcdonnell]

In many instances the Exchange system is configured to not delete messages until the database has been backed up and/or until a certain amount of time has passed. Check the settings with the Exchange Administrator program.

The right order for what you're trying to do is probably:

- back up the database as a precaution
- change the deleted item retention time to 0 days
- change the setting to not delete items until the store has been backed up to off
- delete the messages via ExMerge or at the user level
- back up the database as a precaution
- take the database offline and defrag it
- bring the database back online
- back up the database again
- change the deleted item retention time back to whatever it was before
- reenable setting to not delete items until the store has been backed up

Hope this helps

Gary McDonnell