There are a few items of interest to cover before you defragment any Exchange Server data stores. Follow these best practices to ensure a positive experience and outcome.
§ Configure PerfectDisk for Exchange with sufficient free disk space.
§ Create a current backup of your Exchange data store.
§ Ensure that all users delete unnecessary items from their SENT and DELETED folders.
Prior to starting an offline defragmentation store, you must follow these steps:
§ Configure PerfectDisk with sufficient free space to ensure success. See Configuring Exchange Module for more information.
§ Create a current backup unless one already exists. If the defragmentation run fails or is interrupted, it may corrupt the data store. In such cases, you will need to recover from a backup copy.
§ Delete all unnecessary user items from Sent and Deleted folders to ensure maximum space reclamation. This permits PerfectDisk to recover the most possible space when an Exchange store is offline.
You can defragment an Exchange data store in one of two ways:
Manual start – Run the defragmentation pass immediately. See Starting Exchange Data Store Defragmentation for more information.
Schedule start – Run the defragmentation pass unattended at some predetermined date and time. See Creating a Schedule for Exchange Data Store for more information.
We encourage you to make backups early and often, especially when you perform any changes or optimizations to business or mission-critical software and storage. Despite configuring, defragmenting, and optimizing systems to operate at peak performance, an incorrect or incompatible alteration or setting can cause a system to become unstable or unusable.
That said, there is at least one task you should perform after completing a PerfectDisk offline defragmentation pass: perform a full online backup. When the offline defragmentation process runs, it changes the database signature, which makes it incompatible with old log files. A fresh backup matches the fresh new database correctly.
Related Topics
§ Starting Exchange Data Store Defragmentation
§ Stopping Exchange Data Store Defragmentation