I have not exmerge before and I need to know if I can use of the following requirement on ExchangeServer2003:I have 2TB worth of e-mail account data across two mailbox servers. Our company contracted and a lot of those accounts are users who were layed off, but we never deleted accounts so I still have them all. I've now been asked to "delete" all accounts that are not currently in use, about half (1TB) of my db's. Of course, I know that down the road I'll need an account or accounts after I've finished this process. Even now, we are hiring again so reenabling accounts happens all the time. I want to protect myself from having to rebuild an Ex2003 recovery server as we also plan to upgrade to 2010 soon. I don't want to put anything on tape. Instead I want to be able to rocover the 1TB of mailbox data quickly, per mailbox, if possible. I thought that maybe exmerge would allow me to export the 50% of accounts I don't need and store them online (I have 1TB of storage I could use) or on a hard dirve (keep an older server running Ex2003 for recovery purposes) somewhere, or even an external hdd I can buy that has enough space to store this stuff.If exmerge isn't the solution I'm open to other ideas.....

Since you do not want to keep a copy of the database and don't want to setup a VM of your Exchange server exmerge will do the trick. Be aware that the size of the PST files are going to be larger than the mailboxes. The increase of size is for a number of reasons but mostly because of SIS (Single Instance Storage). Exmerge comes with a good document, make sure you read the document before you run the tool. The main area of importance is permissions you will want to create a new account and make the account a view only admin in your Exchange environment with send as / receive as permissions against the database/s. Again there is a lot more detail in the document so read through the document. Now if you have large mailboxes over 2gb you could run into problems. You are going to need to export these mailboxes in chunks. 1. Open exmerge 2. Next > Extract or Import (Two Step Procedure) > Extract data from an Exchange Server Mailbox > Option > Date > select date 3. Finish the rest of the wizard and run the same steps again until all the data is out of the large mailbox Note: After you run this command you want to change the name of the PST file that was created by exmerge to something like alias-date range of export. This will make sure we do not overright the file next time we run the command Note: If you ever have to add the data back to the Exchange remember you will have to change the PST file name back to the user's alias otherwise exmerge will not work EXMerge is your friend http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2004/07/01/171051.aspx Exchange single-instance storage and its effect on stores when moving mailboxes http://support.microsoft.com/kb/175481 Chris cbfive.com

Great thank you.Sounds like it is a tool I can use to pull mailboxes out that I designate into a pst or pst's....that would work.You mentioned, extract and export...is there a way to remove the pst data and not leave the data in the DB?

Yes when you run the tool change the Import Procedure to Archive Data To Target Store (more information check this link out http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/MF013.html). If you my recommendation I would export the mailbox data with exmerge and purge the mailboxes using EMS. If you need to save disk space or reduce backup time after deleting the users you can change the keep delete mailbox for day (http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/MF022.html) to 1 day and wait for online maintenance to run, change the setting back when you are done. Once the mailboxes have been removed you will still have whitespace, thus keeping your database at a blotted size. To fix this problem you can move the users to a new database thus reducing the size of the database (make sure you move all the users on one database to the same database, again the SIS reason) or if you don't want to move the users to a new database you can run eseutil /d (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb123761(EXCHG.65).aspx) to defrag the database. Before you run eseutil /d make sure you have a good backup and understand the length of time it will take to defrag the database. Note: when you run eseutil the database will be offline so no one will be able to access their email.Let me know if you have questionsChris cbfive.com