Lucid8 created this article as a courtesy and will not provide further support or guidance unless you have engaged a team member for paid Professional Services for Microsoft Exchange.  All information in this article is provided on an "AS IS" basis with no warranties, guarantees of completeness, accuracy, usefulness or timeliness, and as such any action you take thereafter, are done so at your own risk.  

NOTE: If you would like assistance in regards to your Exchange Database .EDB files, for self-service check out DigiScope or engage one of our experts for paid  Professional Services for Microsoft Exchange  assistance.


Overview of the (ESEUTIL) tool -  Exchange Extensible Storage Engine

ATTENTION: Before taking action with ESEUTIL or any other utility against your Exchange Database .EDB file, make sure you have created a "MASTER Backup" of the .EDB and its associated (log & .chk) files which provides you with a rollback position in case something goes wrong wrong such as a power outage, hardware failure, etc.  

  • Moving forward the only use of the "Master Backup" is to make a working copy of the database files. Failure to do this is putting your data at risk, i.e. you could end up making a bad situation much worse and in some cases catastrophic. 

ESEUTIL.exe is a tremendously useful command-line tool for use against Microsoft Exchange Database files which can be used for a variety of purposes, i.e. checking database and log integrity, fixing corrupted databases, along with the ability to defragment/reducing the physical size of an .EDB file.

No matter the reason, ESEUTIL.exe is an extremely powerful tool that can be very helpful when used properly by an Exchange Administrator to;    

  • Defragment/shrink the physical size of an .EDB file
  • Manually roll-up/commit the require logs to an Offline .EDB where the state is Dirty/Inconsistent
  • Validate consistency of  the.EDB and associated .LOG files along with continuity of those .LOG files
  • Recover from a point-in-time backup file set 
  • Repair the .EDB after an Exchange database has become corrupted due to a power cut-off, human error, external attack or hardware failure


Where is ESEUTIL located?

ESEUTIL is located within the Bin directory under your Exchange installation path.


ESEUTIL Capabilities

When it comes to functionality, ESEUTIL tool has a range of helpful switches.  Click on any of the links below to learn more about the most commonly used options:

ESEUTIL /D – Defragment the database files
ESEUTIL /R – Soft Recovery of your database
ESEUTIL /P – Repair corrupt databases
ESEUTIL /M – Display database files, headers, logs or checkpoint files


NOTE:  Lucid8 created this article as a courtesy and will not provide further support or guidance unless you have engaged a team member for paid Professional Services for Microsoft Exchange.  All information in this article is provided on an "AS IS" basis with no warranties, guarantees of completeness, accuracy, usefulness or timeliness, and as such any action you take thereafter, are done so at your own risk. 

NOTE: If you would like assistance in regards to your Exchange Database .EDB files, for self-service check out DigiScope or engage one of our experts for paid  Professional Services for Microsoft Exchange  assistance.