I have a single exchange 2003 std sp2 server running on a W2K3 R2 server, the server has two volumes c: and d: volume d: has 205 GB disk space and currently 99GB free space. The exchange edb and stm have a combine dsize of 74GB situated on the d: volume, recently the mail store was dis-mounting every morning, this was due to the fact that the over night maintenance was seeing the db exceeding its size limit, I have used regedit to make changes to the private-mailstore reg key to hold 75GB (it was 71GB) A week ago I purged a lot of unused mailboxes (4-5GB) and I had a lot of users manually purge unwanted e-mails, however this free space does not seem to show up in the db size, I guess I now need to do a offline defrag. As I have not doe this before I can see that my d: volume has a enough disk space to build another db, however I understand that downtime will be 1-4GB per hour, this is my main concern, so the only option I have is doing this on a weekend. If anyone has any experience with this or can offer some advise or point out any pit falls please advise, I guess doing a full back (using ntbackup) of the mailstore will be a starting point.

Hi Yes, you can calculate on that size per hour, 1-4gb/h I would do a full backup first, then take a copy of edb and stm file, copy it to a temp usb drive etc Then you can continue to do a offline defrag Here's a KB about it http://support.microsoft.com/kb/192185 Jonas Andersson MCTS: Microsoft Exchange Server 2007/2010 | MCITP: EMA 2007/2010 | MCSE/MCSA Blog: http://www.testlabs.se/blog

Hi, Just take a full backup before downtime, update the ESEUtil to latest version, have a look into all switches on -d, since by default it make the temp file in c drive so must have enough space in c drive, or use a switch to change the temp location, have a look into this article : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/192185Ripu Daman Mina | MCSE 2003 & MCSA Messaging