Hi Team,I am System Administrator for one of the compnay in UAE,I manage exchange server 2003 and windows Server 2003.Since i have recently joined this company i have found that the prevoious Administrator has not maintained the exchange database properly.Weare small bussiness company with only 300 users even then we have 450 GB of exchnage databse and all the users are running with OST files we don't have proper archiving policy and for every 3 to 4 months we keep on adding 40 to 50 GB in exchnage database,Can anyone tell me what would be the best way to manage this databse as it keeps on growing everyday and the other important thing is we don't want to loose any of our previous emails due to this we have not even defragmentaed the server from long time due to lack of needed space for defragmentation.

HI,I am myself from UAE and i know and seen lot of ill managed exchange server's. To start with 1. Put Mail box size limits.2. Put limits on attachment size.3. Good Archival Policy.4. Start deleting mail boxes which are not in used.5. Make sure online mailtainence is running well.As if now1. Attach some more drive and make a copy of the dataabase or databases.2. Start taking down time for each database one by one and run defrag and also if possible run isinteg as well to check for loical errors.3. Make sure that you have multiple small sized database instead of one big one.Raj

Even after you delete the older mail, your DB size will not shrink. You would still need to run ESEUtil to shrink it. This can take quite a long time to run. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/317014 You may be better off creating a new Message store after all those policies are set up, then just moving the users mailboxes into it.Mark Morowczynski|MCT| MCSE 2003:Messaging, Security|MCITP:ES, SA,EA|MCTS:Windows Mobile Admin|Security+|http://almostdailytech.com

Agree with both.About more details of Esetuil /d andIsinteg , please view this web page: Exchange Server 2003 On-Demand Taskshttp://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998687(EXCHG.65).aspxFrank Wang

Hi i guess ur Rajnish frm ASP if im not wrong im Abu from Edutech

Thankx im going to go ahead with this process you had shown