I am running Exchange 2007 and have deleted or moved many mailbox users over the last few months. One of my Stores(1) started with 97 gig of free space and now has around 19 gig of free space. I had hoped that by deleting or moving users to other stores, I could free up disk space on this Store(1), however this has not happened. I am not as educated in reference to Exchange as I should be and am a loss as to what the next step to recover this space is. I use BackupExec for my backups. If I were to use the Microsoft Backup, would this solve my issue? It did when my logfiles continued to grow. Should I use defrag as the solution and if so, which kind? I am a little confused about whether to use the defrag in System Tools or "offline defrag" that I keep seeing in the blogs, but don't know much about it. Or is there another solution that I haven't discovered? I appreciate any help and await your answer. Thanks in advance.

Hi,Look for event 1221 in the application log on the exchange server. This event tells you how much white-space is available inside the database.If a lot of GB's are available you can run an offline defrag to free the space:http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998863.aspxIt is however not necessary to run this command as the Exchange server will use this space before expanding the database again.Leif

I agree with Leif, you could defragment Exchange database to obtain more disk space. Defragmentation in system tools(defragment your disk) will not give you more space. How to defragment Exchange databases http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328804