My priv.mdb shows having 2,700 fragments with a 53 GB size. Should I be concernd about this many fragments affecting performance. We do regular online defrag, and mailbox cleanup. Windows Disk Mgmt defrag always says it cannot defrag this file. Should I use eseutil to do an offline defrag? I tried that once a couple weekends ago, but after running eseutil for 12 hours, it looked like it was going to take another 36-48+ hours to complete. Ill need a very long weekend. This DB is 5+ years old, and I dont think an offline defrag has ever been completed against it. Can I just copy the priv.mdb to another disk, delete from original disk, then copy it back, then remount? This is Exchange 2003 std ver: 6.5.7638.1 running on Windows 2003 server std SP2

Question clarification:1) Disk defrag shows 2700 fragments. Should I just ignore this and keep running as is? Will making the DB more contigous improve exchange server performance?2) If I should defrag, is eseutil the only way to defrag? I dont care about whitespace recovery (there is none really) 3) if the store is unmounted, cant windows defrag defrag priv.mdb like any other file?4) since I dont care about whitespace, or internal file fragmentation, will a straight file copy out and back make the priv.mbd sequential?

I don’t think disk drag is required for exchange server database. Usually, if there’s no issue about the store, and significant amount of whitepace, you don’t need to run the offline defrag, and you said whitepace isn’t an issue for you Eseutil is the only tool for defrag, although defrag can be accomplished by moved all mailboxes to another fresh new store and remove the old store, you are using standard edition, so can’t add another store You can move the store files to another place for offline defrag, the procedure is below: 1. Perform a full online backup of all mailbox stores using NTBackup or any other backup software 2. Dismount the mailbox store 3. Browse to the folder where the store files are located ( .edb and .stm) 4. Rename both store files by adding .old to the file names 5. Mount the mailbox store. Answer YES to the warning message to create new empty database for mail service during the offline defrag 6. Copy the old renamed store files to another place. The copy operation will take time over the network so we need to put this in mind Notes: Please backup the store files to another place as well 7. The destination server can be any Windows server even without Exchange installed. You will need to copy Eseutil related files to make the offline defrag (Please refer to the “Exchange Server 2003” section in the KB 244525) Notes: Make sure that you have at least 110 percent free space of the size of both store files combined. If files are 100GB then you need 110GB empty disk space 8. On the destination server, perform the defrag operation 9. Copy the files back to the production server in the original path. You will need to give them a different extension so that we can copy them to the same path where temp store files exist 10. Use ExMerge tool to export the delta period of email service to PST files (More info in KB 292509) 11. Once ExMerge is done, dismount the current mailbox store 12. Rename the current store files to another extension like .123 13. Make sure that the related defragged store files are in place with the correct extension (.edb and .stm) 14. Mount the mailbox store, and then use ExMerge to import the PST files into the mailbox store 15. Now users will have all emails including old and during delta period Resources: Free Disk Space Requirements for Eseutil.exe How to defragment with the Eseutil utility (Eseutil.exe) Eseutil /d Defragments the Database and the Streaming FileJames Luo TechNet Subscriber Support (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/ms788697.aspx) If you have any feedback on our support, please contact tngfb@microsoft.com

More resource: “When Not to Run Eseutil /D” section in Eseutil /D Defragmentation ModeJames Luo TechNet Subscriber Support (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/ms788697.aspx) If you have any feedback on our support, please contact tngfb@microsoft.com