I have hit an issue on a MS SBS machine where every morning the datastore for the exchange mailboxes dismounts itself.
We believe the issue is that it has grown too large over time and needs cut down a bit.
As part of this we have removed (purged) some mail files that were no longer needed, which should have given us a saving of roughly 3GB (more than enough saving for what we need).
So I deleted the mailboxes, then purged them and noticed that the .edb file was still reporting the same size, I dismounted and remounted it to see if that would have any effect but it did not.
Am I missing a step? I have read online that you can run offline defrag on the file but that seems to only save you a small amount of whitespace.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Best Answer
Whilst your Exchange database will automatically increase in size when needed, it will not shrink in size automatically. So the 3GB of space you have freed up is there, but it is still allocated to Exchange, and as the mailbox store size increases again, it will use up this space first. So for the next 3GB of mailbox store increase you should not see an actual increase in size of the file on disk.
If you actually need to get the space back on disk, then you will need to do an offline defrag.
Also make sure you have done a full backup recently to ensure all the log files have been cleaned up.