Remove a Mailbox Database Copy

  • Article

Applies to: Exchange Server 2010

These procedures show you how to remove a copy of a mailbox database. You cannot use these procedures to remove the last copy of a mailbox database. For detailed steps about how to remove the last copy of a mailbox database, see Remove a Mailbox Database or Remove-MailboxDatabase. Mailbox database copies can only be removed from a healthy database availability group (DAG). If the DAG isn't healthy (for example, the DAG's underlying cluster is down because quorum was lost), you won't be able to remove any mailbox database copies.

After removing a database copy, you must manually delete any database and transaction log files from the server from which the database copy is being removed.

Looking for other management tasks related to mailbox database copies? Check out Managing Mailbox Database Copies.

Use the EMC to remove a mailbox database copy

You need to be assigned permissions before you can perform this procedure. To see what permissions you need, see the "mailbox database copies" entry in the High Availability Permissions topic.

  1. In the console tree, navigate to Organization Configuration > Mailbox.
  2. In the result pane, on the Database Management tab, select the mailbox database whose copy you want to remove.
  3. In the work pane, on the Database Copies tab, right-click the database copy that you want to remove, and then click Remove.
  4. Click Yes to remove the database copy.

Use the Shell to remove a mailbox database copy

You need to be assigned permissions before you can perform this procedure. To see what permissions you need, see the "mailbox database copies" entry in the High Availability Permissions topic.

This example removes a copy of a mailbox database named DB1 from a Mailbox server named MBX3.

Remove-MailboxDatabaseCopy -Identity DB1\MBX3 -Confirm:$False