Exchange Database Maintenance

Microsoft has come a long way with the Exchange databases, so long in fact, that under normal circumstances, all you really have to do is leave them alone, and they will work fine. My situation isn’t exactly normal. The organization is migrating from a system that was basically unlimited (until they decided to purge old mail because they ran out of space) to a controlled system. Of course, they don’t have to clean up before they are migrated, so, here comes the 6 gig mailboxes. Then they clean up. This along with a delay in deploying the last two servers (which caused many more users than expected added to the first two, then moved once the last two were up) caused us to end up with several databases with more white space than actual data. This is hard on the backups, since, it backs up the white space too, 466 gigabytes worth, and it is getting a little too close for comfort on available disk space on the drives in which the databases reside. So, I get to spend a weekend running defrag scripts. Fortunately, I have it automated enough that all I have to do is keep an eye on it to make sure nothing goes wrong, but, I still have to keep an eye on it.