mail store restore 2

[aarellano]

Hello,

I was wondering if I backup my priv1.edb and priv1.stm files, then do a defrag on those files can I rename the original ones and put the defragged files?

 

[Zelandakh]

You *can* but eseutil /t does that for you.

 

[aarellano]

so it would be something like

eseutil /t c:/mybackuppriv/priv1.edb
and
eseutil /t c:/mybackuppriv/priv1.stm

 

[58sniper]

Can I ask what's the reasoning for doing a defrag?

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[aarellano]

the president of my company brought in a program from home that was infected. It was trying to send masive amounts of email. I located the source, and fixed it. but I am getting errors on my logs that the store is too big

priv1.edb is about 15gigs and the priv1.stm is about 6gigs
so I wanted to defrag both files and see if that would make them a bit smaller.

 

[58sniper]

Look in the event logs for event ID 1221. That will tell you how much white space is in the database. Unless that is >30% of the total size of the database, it's not worth taking the store offline for hours to do a defrag.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[ShackDaddy]

Before any sort of defrag will be useful, you'll need to delete the data that's in your president's Sent items, as the defrag only reclaims empty space. If you can, do a Shift+Delete so that the items you're deleting don't end up being retained for the duration of your retention settings.

First priority should not be an offline defrag, but in setting the custom schedule for database maintenance/management so that it has plenty of time to complete an ONLINE defrag. That will identify the whitespace in your database, and your store will NOT go offline if the online defrag is able to complete and identifies enough free space. If you have not deleted enough of that junk, the online defrag will not provide the whitespace in the database that you need, and an OFFLINE defrag will do nothing for you.

Long story short: don't rush to do an offline defrag. Focus on getting an online defrag to complete so that you know whether you've been able to properly clear enough space.

You can do an offline defrag down the road if you feel like you really need to make the .edb file smaller, but as far as danger of the database dismounting or being too large, an offline defrag is not the solution. An online defrag is.

Dave Shackelford
ThirdTier.net

 

[markdmac]

I agree with the above advice. in the event you do decide to do an offline defrag though:

How To: Check and Repair an Exchange Database faq955-5581

I hope you find this post helpful.

Regards,

Mark

Check out my scripting solutions at

http://www.thespidersparlor.com/vbscript

Work SMARTER not HARDER. The Spider's Parlor's Admin Script Pack is a collection of Administrative scripts designed to make IT Administration easier! Save time, get more work done, get the Admin Script Pack.

 

[aarellano]

if I do an online defrag can users will still be able to send and receive e-mails?
Would another option be to copy both the priv1.mdb and priv1.stm to a network drive (that has enough space) and then defrag those???

 

[markdmac]

if I do an online defrag

The system will do the online defrag automatically and yes, the database is accessible at that time for users to send & receive.

The online defrag is les intrusive, however it is slower. If you have a LOT of white space to recover then I recommend the offline defrag with redirection of the temp files so you actually get a fresh database out of it.

I hope you find this post helpful.

Regards,

Mark

Check out my scripting solutions at

http://www.thespidersparlor.com/vbscript

Work SMARTER not HARDER. The Spider's Parlor's Admin Script Pack is a collection of Administrative scripts designed to make IT Administration easier! Save time, get more work done, get the Admin Script Pack.

 

[aarellano]

so for the online defrag isthe same command

eseutil /d c:\mdbdata\priv1.edb

 

[markdmac]

You don't initiate an online defrag as mentioned above

The system will do the online defrag automatically

I hope you find this post helpful.

Regards,

Mark

Check out my scripting solutions at

http://www.thespidersparlor.com/vbscript

Work SMARTER not HARDER. The Spider's Parlor's Admin Script Pack is a collection of Administrative scripts designed to make IT Administration easier! Save time, get more work done, get the Admin Script Pack.

 

[aarellano]

ahhh sorry about that.

that is in the Mailbox Store (myserver)--->Properties--> database--> Maintenance Interval?

 

[58sniper]

That's when it will run, but you don't do anything to trigger it. It runs every day (by default).

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[ShackDaddy]

The larger your store, the more time it will take to do the online defrag.

Sometimes it takes multiple days to do the defrag if it's only allowed to run between 11pm and 5am, so I had mentioned the idea of freeing up more time for it to run in the custom schedule in order to get it done quicker. I worked on a server this week that I had to set the schedule to run all day Saturday and Sunday in order to get things to finish, and it finished at 4am Monday morning. But that store was about 118gb, and the processor and disk speed of the system will make a difference too.

Dave Shackelford
ThirdTier.net

 

[aarellano]

Thank you for all the help. I will try that this weekend.

 

[people3]

Hi,

I also assume that you are running exchange 2003 Standard.

If you make sure SP2 is installed for exhange you can increase the maximume mail store size

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/912375

Before doing this though make sure you have enough disk space.