How to Reduce The Size of EDB Files

Exchange Server has become the server choice of most business organizations, as it stores emails, contacts, calendars etc, and is simple to handle. However, if the size of the EDB files (file format of Exchange) increases, it may lead to the corruption of the files.

So, to reduce the drastic growth in the size of the file, users should get prepared. When it is required to increase the size of the database, Exchange will automatically do it but, shrinkage doesn’t happen. Each Server has a particular size limit allotted and if exceeded, may lead to issues. In the case of corruption users can use Exchange EDB to PST Converter to repair and convert edb to pst, eml, msg, html and eml file format.

These article will guide you through how to reduce the size of Exchange EDB files.

Ways to reduce the file size

One may come across many methods to reduce the file size. Let us see some of them in this article. Users can opt for backup of the EDB files or delete the unwanted mailboxes from the server, or even go for offline defragmentation. The discussion starts with the backup method.

In-order to backup the EDB files you will have to lend the help of Windows Server Backup. The steps are as following:

1. Login to Exchange Server.
2. Run Windows Server Backup utility.
3. Choose your Action and then, go for ‘Backup Once’.
4. Select the different options and proceed. Either you can choose ‘Full Server’ or ‘Custom Backup’ options.
5. Locate the destination to store files and move.
6. If the user rights are to be given, go for the ‘inherit’ option.
7. Select ‘Advanced Option’ panel and proceed with ‘VSS full backup’.
8. Run backup and close once it is done.

If this is not properly working, you can delete the mailboxes that are not of much use anymore. The mailboxes of the users who have left the company can be removed but, remember to take the backup for future needs, if any.

The file size will appear the same as before, so it is recommended to go for Offline Defragmentation. But, to do offline defragmentation there is a need of half the database size in the hard drive space to run. To avoid this issue, you could increase the configure size.

Steps to increase the size configured:

1. Open Register editor  and search for:
   
2. If key “Database Size Limit in GB” DWORD exists under “Private-[database GUID]” then, change the value to gigabytes. If it doesn’t exit, create DWORD “Database Size Limit in GB”, and set gigabytes.
3. Restart Exchange Information Store.
4. Check for Event ID 1216 in Event Viewer and it will give the current size.

You can choose any of the options, all these helps to reduce the file size.