Our information store has grown to 300GB+ due to a disaster recovery. What is the best course of action to reduce this store? We are having users delete, but its obvious we are not re-claiming space. Exchange 2003 Enterprise w/approx 2500 users. Thanks, Mari

Offline defrag of the store will clear the whitespace: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328804

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328804 Offline defrag if whitespace is the issue.

Hi, when you do an offline defrag to your Exchange DB, then the size should reduced if it contains whitespace. after doing so, if your DB still huge, please follow microsoft best practices for the maximum size of Exchang DB. Microsoft recommends not to have the maximum size of single Mailbox Database more than 100 GB, forbest performance and fast accessibility and research. if you manage to decrease your Database and its still not reach the recommended size, then you can do the following: create a new storage group, and a new mailbox database, and start moving some mailboxes to this new mailbox store and new storage group. try to distribute your mailboxes between mailbox database , if not equally , then at least choose some mailboxes and move them to the new database. take backup after you move some mailboxes , inorder to committ the trans logs that been created as result of teh move process. what i am trying to say here, that you need to create more mailbox stores and move some of the users to this store, in order to divide and distribute the mailboxes into different and dependent mailbox stores. also make sure that each mailbox store database does not reach the recommended size of 100 GB. please let me know if the above information did help you in solving or asnwering your question. Regards,

Be aware however that an offline defrag of a store of this size will require a large amount of time, as well as requiring a disk/lun that can take a possible 300gb file being genrated. A defrag, using the "keep temp file" is probably a idea for you, especially as you just finished recovering from a DR.One other option you have is to create a new store with empty mailboxes for all users, call a dial-tone store, and then restore the user's old mail into that new store.