Offline defrag - disaster recovery

[SnoopFrogg]

I am planning on running an offline defrag. What should I backup for disaster recovery purposes?

I understand that a mailbox backup won't do me any good due to pages being rearranged during the defragmentation so I was going to make a copy of the entire Program Files\Exchsrvr\MDBDATA directory. Would running an exmerge be a good idea? How long would exmerge take with a 8.2GB priv.edb and a 2.5GB priv1.stm (dual 2.8GHz Xeon procs and 4GB of RAM)?

I understand this is probably overkill but I'm worried about the unthinkable.

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SnoopFrogg
MCSA+Security - Windows Server 2003
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[Zelandakh]

There is no such thing as overkill, only a lack of it in hindsight.

Actually you only need copy the priv*.* after you've stopped the store. Defrag it, mount it, make sure it works.

To overkill, stop the SMTP connector, disable MAPI connectors, Veritas Backup the store AND mailboxes, ntbakup the store, exmerge the mailboxes. THEN do the defrag

Exmerge is dependent on the disks which you didn't list, but I'd guess an hour based on my normal exmerge speed.