Good morning. I have a single Exchange 2010 server. We have no archiving implemented and database is outgrowing the physical server capacity. I have dozen or so accounts for employees that are no longer with the company. I'd like to delete those accounts to free up some space and make DB smaller, but I need to keep them for all sort of compliance purposes. I've read some forums about exporting mailboxes to pst files, but pst files are stored in the same database or on the same server, so it doesn't help me with my space issue. What are my options? I"m not an exchange administrator (just wearing this hat), so I would appreciate detailed explanation. Thank you, Vladimir

Hi Deleting mail or mailboxes will not in itself reduce the size of your database EBD file. The file size will only eve increase during normal use and any deletions only free up "white space" within it. To see the amount of white space in your databases you can run this command: Get-MailboxDatabase -Status | select name,@{l="Size";e={$_.databasesize.togb()}},@{l="White Space";e={$_.availablenewmailboxspace.togb()}} The only options for reducing the file size are moving all the mailboxes to another database and deleting this one or performing an offline defrag. Cheers, Steve

Just as Steve said, go to check for the "white space". If you need to free up space on the DB, you need do offline defrag. How to Run Eseutil /D (Defragmentation) http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa995748(v=exchg.65).aspx Thanks, EvanEvan Liu TechNet Community Support

When you create and delete a large number of test mailboxes over and over again in a pilot phase of a project, you may want to clean up the Mailbox Database before going into production. With the clean-database powershell command you are able to cleanup the mailbox database. The command will purge all mailboxes that have an expired retention date. When you run the command clean-mailboxdatabase in the Exchange Management Shell without setting the retention time you may receive the following event in your Application eventlog. Event 9535: 0 deleted mailboxes (0 kb) have been removed 100 deleted mailboxes (2348382 kb) have been retained By default the retention date is set to 30 days and it is set on the mailbox database. When you would like to purge mailboxes deleted for example today, you need to set the retention time on zero days. You can do this by access the Exchange Management Console or executing the command below in the Exchange Management Shell set-mailboxdatabase -Identity "Mailbox Database" -MailboxRetention 00.00:00:00 To clean up the mailbox database you need to run the clean-mailboxdatabase command. clean-mailboxdatabase -identity "Mailbox Database" In the event log of the machine you will see Event 9535: 100 deleted mailboxes (2348382 kb) have been removed 0 deleted mailboxes (0 kb) have been retained Next step is to compact and defrag the mailbox database, this is done by dismounting the mailbox database and use the esutil.exe utility to defrag the database. Start a command line and go to the directory where the mailbox database residesStart eseutil /d "Mailbox Database.edb"Mount the database. When you are finished you may want to set the retention time of the deleted mailboxes back to the original setting by executing the command below: set-mailboxdatabase -Identity "Mailbox Database" -MailboxRetention 30.00:00:00 After all of this you have a clean database and you can transfer your project to the next phase.