So I recently came into a position to manage the server for our small, 12 person, company. The previous sysadmin here had absolutely no clue what he was doing, and has left the following situation. I fortunately know alot more about computers and PC management, however have very little experience with networking/servers, and particularly windows server 2003.
The server hard drive (500GB) was partitioned into a 30GB system drive, a 400GB data drive, and a 70GB private data drive.
The quickbooks file was installed directly onto the system drive, which is running 99.9% of the time with less than 2GB remaining of space. I must delete logs weekly in order to keep any chance of space available on the drive. The file is only hosted on the server, the server itself does not run quickbooks actively (it is installed).
The system volume itself has not been defragmented in probably 7-8 years, and is 92% fragmented.
The quickbooks file itself is damaged. It cannot be made into a portable file, and cannot be backed up at all. We are running on borrowed time before it likely crashes entirely, however management decision is to simply keep trucking forward with it in its current state. (we have even sent it to intuit to have them try to fix it, and they replied it is impossible to be repaired, there are over 25,000 validation errors).
My question is as follows:
As our quickbooks is generally in use 24-7 by some members of our company, would defragging the drive be a serious performance problem, and if so, how bad/long should I estimate?
What would be the most effective way to increase the system volume size SAFELY to a reasonable level? Keeping in mind that almost no backups are available, what kind of downtime should I expect to do this?
