Some new tricks I learned today on good old Esetuil.exe tool in Exchange 2010 SP3 and Exchange 2013.
We all know, when database is online and mounted, you won’t be able to perform any actions with Eseutil.exe.
For example,
Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus returns
Database e15db3 is mounted on Exchange 2013 server mbx1.
If you try to run eseutil /mh or eseutil /y, you would receive following error,
Now, with new Eseutil switches introduced in Exchange 2010 sp3 and Exchange 2013, you can perform actions while database is online and mounted.
/vss switches utilize Windows VSS engine and snapshot to perform the tasks that you traditionally have to dismount database first.
If you run eseutil /mh /vss, it will dump database info with “Dirty Shutdown” status, because it did not play the missing logs into the snapshot.
So, you want to run eseutil /mh /vss /vssrec eNN “logpath” for optimal result.
If you want to perform quick database backup, you can now run eseutil /y /d /vss /vssrec to achieve that, without using any type of backup software. This is my favorite, and the most useful action!
You can verify the backup file with eseutil /mh
You now, have an up to date database backup!
Troubleshooting Exchange 
Haven’t tried it yet, but by chance does it remove/truncate TLOGs too? If so this would be a great backup solution for small shops. Otherwise Windows Backup will still be required 😦
Surprised I hadn’t heard about this, seems worth MS calling out in their EHLO blog on SP3!
No log truncation & not supported as a replacement to a proper backup tool. However, it could be used to perform an offline seed in a DAG.
Didn’t think it would do that, oh well.
Andrew is correct. It does not truncated the logs or stamp “backup” information on database.
Reblogged this on Jason (Izzy) Sherry's Blog and commented:
New to 2010 SP3 and 2013, surprised I hadn’t heard about this until now!
Tested on my lab(Exchange 2013) too – same results but logs didn’t truncated.
Pingback: NeWay Technologies – Weekly Newsletter #41 – May 2, 2013NeWay | NeWay
Hi Ron,
Thanks a lot for such a highly informative post. But I fear to share that Eseutil.exe fails to provide expected result in severe troublesome situations and in this situation, no log truncation is done.
Hi everybody,
I followed this procedure without having read the comments…
I expected that the logs could be truncated, so how could I truncate the logs please?
It does not truncate logs. You still have to dismount and delete the logs manually or run backup.
My database is in a clean shutdown, do you think that this command should help me to backup and purge the logs?
eseutil /y temp.edb /d d:\backup-temp\backuptemp.edb /vss /vssrec E03 “d:\exchange logs\temp”
That’s correct, using this method logs will not truncate, this method does not send anything back to ESE saying its been backed up and can now be truncated.
This is not meant s a backup replacement, even with the DB down in clean shutdown you will still need to manually remove logs.
After this command, i moved manually all the logs to another folder, but all the logs are being rebuilt since i resume the database in production! How could i solve that?
You can’t, because that’s working as designed. Once database is mounted, new logs are generated.
The goal of my initiative was to reduce the space disk used by the logs. That’s why i started to try to clean my database “dirty shutdown” state, and after to make a backup, in order to have the logs truncated.
I don’t know if the command i used has truncated anything, but i didn’t earn any Mb on the drive.
I have a 470GB database, and a logs folder of 603GB! Could you help me how could i deal with that?
Ok now i understand that i have to use Windows Server Backup to finish the job. I will do.
Hi everybody,
I launched a full backup of my server with Windows server backup, but the logs are still as big as before the backup! didn’t earn space on my hard disks.
How could i manage to purge these huge logs?
Many thanks…
Please use exchange aware backups, and run Full backups for your databases.