Hi , 

I cleaned up one of my mailbox databases ( disconnected and soft deleted mailboxes) with remove and update commands but mailbox database capacity did not change at all. Can anyone tell me where was I wrong or what I missed?

Hi , 

I cleaned up one of my mailbox databases ( disconnected and soft deleted mailboxes) with remove and update commands but mailbox database capacity did not change at all. Can anyone tell me where was I wrong or what I missed?

Not sure what you mean by capacity, but the size of the database on disk does not shrink unless you were to do an offline defrag ( not recommended). You will have white space in the database once mailboxes are removed or purged after their mailbox retention time has ex

Hi,

If you find that there is a lot of white space in the mailbox database and you want to re-claim this, it's best to create a new mailbox database and move the mailboxes then delete the old mailbox database.

To find out how much whitespace you have in your mailbox databases, run the below command:

Get-MailboxDatabase -Server ExSvr01 | ft name,*available*

Thanks.

1. Andy is 100% correct
2. Are there any mailboxes left within the DB?  If not you can dial tone it to quickly resolve the space issue else you would need to either MOVE all mailboxes and then dial tone or defrag the DB

Thanks for reply Andy. but I am little bit confused; once a mailbox deleted or soft-removed  how retention policy can still be applied ? unless by you mean "*Keep deleted mailboxes for (days)" ? can you explain a little bit more?

• Edited by fnasimi 15 hours 9 minutes ago

You have two retention policies

1. Deleted Item Retention wherein if its set to 30 days for example that DB will retain that information for 30 days and once the retention date is passed the data will be marked as permanently deleted so that NEW data can utilize that space.  However the physical size of the DB will never shrink unless you do as I posted above

2. Deleted Mailbox Retention works the same way, however its a separate setting.  Either way the process is the same as are the results

thanks for reply mark. I could find out the white space , your command did not work , I think maybe I am on 2013. but you post help me to find the right command:

Get-MailboxDatabase -id "database" -Status | select name,availablenewmailboxspace

the problem is I am a little bit tight in storage space and moving to another database is difficult. I was hopping that can find a safe way to purge and reclaim this space. Any other suggestion ?

So again

1. Are there any mailboxes left within the DB? 
2. If not you can dial tone it to quickly resolve the space issue else you would need to either MOVE all mailboxes and then dial tone or defrag the DB

Defrag will do this for you but if it's a problem with storage on a physical Exchange server and you don't have space to defrag, you can move the mailboxes to another server.

The space is usable. If you find that there is 100GB of available space on the mailbox database, Exchange will use this before increasing the size of the edb file.

Thanks everybody,

Still I have about 400 users on that database so moving them to another new database is difficult. But I think I got my answer now.