Cleaning up Exchange
I need to clean up a Windows 2003 Exchange database, it is growing too large. What command should I use?

    Requires Free Membership to View

    Login

    When you register, you’ll also receive targeted alerts from my team of editorial writers and independent industry experts with the latest news, tips, and advice to help you do your job more efficiently and effectively. Our goal is to keep you informed on the hottest topics and biggest challenges faced by Exchange professionals today working with Exchange, Outlook and other related technologies.

    Margie Semilof, Editorial Director

    By submitting your registration information to SearchExchange.com you agree to receive email communications from TechTarget and TechTarget partners. We encourage you to read our Privacy Policy which contains important disclosures about how we collect and use your registration and other information. If you reside outside of the United States, by submitting this registration information you consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States. Your use of SearchExchange.com is governed by our Terms of Use. You may contact us at webmaster@TechTarget.com.

Not sure what you mean by "cleaning up" the database. Exchange does the clean up for you during the nightly maintenance interval, and you normally don't need to do any cleanup manually. Besides, such clean up, or offline defragmentation, will result in an outage.

Nevertheless, should you want to do this, the first step is taking a look at Event ID 1221 in the server's Application Event Log for that store. it will tell you whether there is enough free space in the store. If there isn't much free space, I wouldn't recommend doing it.

If you've determined there's enough free space in the store and you need to reclaim disk space, the command is:

eseutil /d

Other details and considerations for offline defragmentation are documented in KBA 192185.

This was first published in July 2006

Back to top