Exchange 5.5 - reclaiming disk space?

ESEUTIL can be used to conduct an offline defrag of your databases, which will allow you to reclaim some disk space. The amount of disk space you reclaim may or may not be significant.

A caveat: in order to defragment a database, you must have available disk space equal to twice the size of database being processed. This space must be available on the disk/ partion where the database resides. If you are running critically short of disk space, you may not be able to conduct the defrag.

A CAUTION from Microsoft: "You should use ESEUTIL only in consultation with Microsoft Technical Support. It is an optional component provided solely for troubleshooting purposes. It should not be used as a regular maintenance tool." This is not necessarily meant to scare you away from using ESEUTIL, as much as it is meant to impress upon you the severe reprocussions from using it improperly.

If you are running short of disk space (and you have enough space to run ESEUTIL), you can possibly buy yourself some time by using it. However, in the long run, you (and your users) will be better served by buying a larger disk and moving your databases to the new disk. Make sure you use the Exchange Performance Optimizer utility to move your databases. Using any other method would probably result in Exchange becoming inoperable.

Good Luck.