I'm currently debating the best way to approach reclaiming hard drive space and shrinking my backup size when backing up Exchange 2010. I've read a few arguments for offline defragging of my stores as well as just creating new stores and migrating mailboxes to them, and I was hoping to get some opinions about my specific scenario.
Exchange 2010 Standard SP3, single server holding all mail roles, no DAG, stores are stored local on the server.
Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, 79 GB out of 570 GB free on the drive containing the stores. There is no other drive with near enough space to make new stores on locally.
Using Symantec Backup Exec 2010 R3 SP2 for my backup software.
| Store | File Size in Explorer | Available White Space |
|---|---|---|
| Store1 | 139 GB | 111.2 GB |
| Store2 | 104 GB | 15.58 GB |
| Store3 | 81.36 GB | 199.4 MB |
| Store4 | 127.63 | 52.63 MB |
Keep in mind that including my public folder store, I've got the maximum of five stores mounted in 2010 Standard. That white space will be increasing shortly when I purge about 40 mailboxes by around 15-20 GB across the four stores.
Given my scenario I'm thinking that my best course of action is to run an offline defrag of Store1, with the temp file streamed to another server with available space (the two are connected by a 4 GB NIC Teams), then offline defrag the remaining three
stores (or just Store2 if stores 3 and 4 white space doesn't grow significantly post-purge) in the same manner, as I don't appear to be able to gain enough disk space back to reach the 110% free space threshold required to run the streaming file locally.
Thank you in advance for weighing in on this!