dear all i want to delete mailbox that contains 150 GB of data, but i want to be sure that after deletion, the preserved size eill be free so i can free up 150 Gb ThanksAshraf Khalifah

Seems to be duplicate: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/exchangesvrgeneral/thread/781e2033-7c9a-4506-af16-1a26f8d40c7cWith kind regards Krystian Zieja http://www.projectnenvision.com Follow me on twitter My Blog

hi, thanks for your reply but what do you mean by "it will free space in edb file but it will not resize edb file" ? also what do you mean by shrind edb file?Ashraf Khalifah

Hi, I think the following is what Krystian want to say. When mailboxes are moved from an Exchange 2010 SP1 database to any other database, Exchange doesn't fully delete the mailbox from the source database immediately upon completion of the move. Instead, the mailbox in the source mailbox database is switched to a soft-deleted state. Mailbox data can be accessed during a mailbox restore operation using the MailboxRestoreRequest cmdlet set. The soft-deleted mailboxes are retained in the source database until either the deleted mailbox retention period expires or you use the Remove-StoreMailbox cmdlet to purge the mailbox. So if you want to free up 150 GB, you need to run this command: Remove-StoreMailbox Resource: Remove-StoreMailbox Understanding Move Requests Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

Hi Ashraf, Please let me know that what is the version of Exchange? You can run offline defrag to recover the space after the deletion of mailbox. Once you delete a mailbox, online maintanence will create a whitespace but it will not retrieve the space. To reclaim 150 GB of space, you have to run offline defrag. ESEUTIL /D "File_Path" Example: ESEUTIL /D "C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\MDBDATA\Priv1.edb". Thanks, Niket

thanks niket I have exchange 2007 sp2, now i will not delete the mailbox otherwise i will move it to another new db and then i will delete the old db because defragmentation takes very long time and i can not make the db offline, so does this work around solution applicaple???Ashraf Khalifah

@Ashraf Yes, that will work fine. Sometimes when I run the offline defrag, it never completes or hangs. When working with customers, the outage will not be acceptable. In these cases, I create a new database and move the mailboxes across to the new database. Then delete the old one. However, bear in mind when you are moving mailboxes there will be excessive transactions logs generated. So make sure you have enough space on your transaction log drive. You may want to do this over a period of time, depending on how much space you have on the transaction log drive and how often and the type of backup you are performing. I would recommend a full, if not a incremental to purge the transaction logs. Sukh

Hi Ashraf, you have a good plan. Go ahead and move the mailboxes to new database and then delete old one.