Hi everyone,This is my first post here, nice to meet you all~ Recently I started receieving an event log about the information store is close to it's 18Gb limited(at 17Gb 2 days ago), so I asked our staffs to clean out their mails, it's still in progress and I can see we roughtly saved 1Gb of space from the Exchange System Manger ...the cleaing still keep going....But somehow this morning the Exchange(2003) stop working as the exchange database is dismounted, so re-mount it for a quick fix but I really want to know do I need to do something to re-gain the space?I'm also want to do a proper archive for each user, however few staffs has more then 3.5Gb of stuff in their mailbox - I really scratching my head because as I know, the .pst file can't > 2 Gb and when I try to "export" the mails to a .pst file, I get an error and the export abanded. Bad enough, it seems I can't split the archive according to the date... can any give me some suggestions?Thanks in advance! Keith

Hello Keith, If your Exchange 2003 server is the Enterprise edition, we can directly upgrade it to Service Pack 2. after upgrading Exchange 2003 SP2, the max size of database will be add to about 75GB. Additional suggestionsfor your consideration: 1. Can you perform a offline defrag with ESEutil? http://support.microsoft.com/kb/192185/en-us 2. Can you create an new mailbox store and move half of the mailboxes to the store?

I hope you are running Exchange 2003 Standard Edition. If you didnt install SP2 then install it and after that you can do the registry modification to get the database limit from 18 GB to 75 GB.Follow this article: How to increase the Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2 18-gigabyte database size limit Let me know how you are exporting mails to PST. About archiving the mailbox to PST, you can create multiple PSTs based on date. In outlook -> File -> Archive -> select Archive this folder and sub-folders option -> Mailbox User Name -> Select Archive item older than <Select the date> -> Select Select PST File -> OK

Hi all~Jason, the Exchange server is just a standard edition, so I'm better look at how to archive the mail instead of increasing the db size... But on the other hand, this gives us a good chance to look after our server & outlook Just hope no big dramas! Also thanks for the link, I know I'll need it in the near future!Amit, really really thanks for your reply, I'll try it out next morning, I'm sure it'll do the trick!!!! Finally there're some light at the end of the tunnel! So I'm guess I may need to perform the offline defrag, never run this utility before so would like to take this chance to ask how risky to do the defrag? Or anything I should really look at before I run the command? Thanks!

You can have a detailed look at EseutilNotes. First of all make sure that you have full backup to be safer side. To see how much free space you may have in an Exchange Database file after defragment just check in the event logs and look for recent occurrences of event 1221 or run eseutil /ms (database should be offline during this switch), that is the white space in your database. If this shows huge amount of white space, in that case only I would suggest to go for that else database won't compress much. Before using Eseutil /d - Microsoft recommend following points. Make sure before running eseutil /d that you should have at least 110% of the database files size available in free disk space on volume where defragmented copy of the database file is being created. Microsoft does not recommend running Eseutil /d as a regular maintenance practice, as the online maintenance takes care of this. Exchange database should be in consistent state while you run eseutil /d on it. Example : eseutil.exe /d C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\MDBDATA\priv1.edb

Hi Amit, Thanks for the info and the web site is nice! I'm just wondering, to make a "full backup" of the exchange DB, do I simply make a copy of the priv1.edb file while it's offline? Or there's other proper way to make a backup? Sorry for the dumb questions coz I'm a newbie on exchange, butmore research is on the way....

Thanks, no problem, information is here There are two type of Exchange backup, online and offline. Online always recommended since it doesnt required to interrupt Exchange Availability . Find more detail at Overview of Exchange Server Backup Methods Exchange 2003 Backup and Restore with NTBACKUP- Online Backup Since you are going to stop exchange services to do offline defragmentation, you can take offline backup. Method is the same take a copy of edb,stm file, log files, chk files.

Hi All & Amit, I've done the offline defrag on Saturday night, it was successfull, thanks for your help! But... there's always a "but".... When I check the event viewer, I still get a 9688 event which is about my exchange db is 17gb and close to the 18gb limit. Before the offline defrag, I've moved one of our ex-staffs email to a PST file, which is about 2gb of size, and some users also deleted their mails(I checked the mailboxes sizewe should claimat least 1 gb of space)- so I guess there should be a more space I can gain after the offline defrag, however it doesn't happend, do you know why?

Did you check the event 1221 before defragmentation which should show you approximately how much space offline defragmentation can make? Let me clear the full cleanup process of Exchange, When you delete mailboxes from database it does not clear it from database until retentation period. (Retentation period is -> Right click on mailbox database -> click on limits tab -> Deletion Setting -> Keep deleted mailboxes for days) When retentation period is over then online maintenance should run which clear/clean the space in database as a white/free space and gives you 1221 event in event log when it completes with detail white space amount but keep in mind that, still this doesnt decrease the size of your database, it just create free/white space in it. (Online Maintenancescheduled at -> Right click on mailbox database -> click ondatabase tab->Maintenance Intervel) Now when you do offline defragment it compresses (delete white space) and decrease the database size which was given in 1221 event log. Hope this cleares you why it didn't decrease the space.