How do I Recover disk space after removing mailbox

[DJ2liveUK]

I have removed a users mailbox within Exchange 5.5 and I have noticed that the 1.5GB disk space has not been recovered.

Is there a way to do this, like a third party tool?

DJ

 

[SjrH]

You need to run the eseutil utility to defrag your IS.

There is some information here -

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;192185

be careful with this tool and use it wisely, its easy to make a mistake!
Also make sure you have a good backup and plenty of free disk space!

 

[DJ2liveUK]

Thanks for the speedy response, I will check it out.

 

[zbnet]

You might not get all the 1.5GB back, if some of the mail in this now deleted mailbox was shared with other users. In fact it's possible (not likely, but possible) that you won't get any space back at all if all the mail was shared with other mailboxes, because of single instance storage.

Check your application event log for overnight 1221 events, these will tell you how much white space you have in your stores. I probably wouldn't bother doing an offline defrag for just 1.5GB of space.

 

[DJ2liveUK]

okay. i will bear that in mind. thanks for all your help.

DJ

 

[sladd]

Do you need the disk space back or do you want to reclaim the space for use by your exchange database? If you want the hdd space, you need the offline defrag as described above. If you just want the space to be available for your email database, you need to set the retention time for deleted items and then wait for an online deframentation to finish. At this time you will get a message in your event viewer (event id 1228 i think) saying priv.edb has xxxx mb of free space after online defragmentation completed. Online defrag runs by default.

Set the retention time of deleted items in exchange admin. if you need to reclaim the space asap, set your maintenance windows to always to ensure that online defraf is completed asap.

 

[Notleks]

Can you use a drive mapped to another server for the defrag?

It seems to me that the people most likely to need to perform a defrag to reclaim disk space are unlikely to have space equal to 110% of their priv.edb available.

 

[zbnet]

You can, but it shows the whole thing down really badly. You might be better off if you can temporarily adding extra disks to your controller, and use the local storage.