HOW TO DELETE OLD BACK UP FILES AND TRANSACTION LOGS IN SQL 2005

SQL 2005 DOES NOT HAVE THE SAME FEATURE THAT WAS IN 2000 TO DELETE OLDER FILES OLDER THAN CERTAIN DAYS. I DO HAVE A JOB THAT CREATES A FULL DAILY BACKUPS BUT SINCE I DON'T HAVE ENOUGH SPACE, I WOULD LIKE TO FIND A WAY TO DELETE ALL OLD BACKUP FILES OLDER THAN X AMOUNT OF DAYS AND ALSO DELETE TRANSACTION FILES OLDER THAN X AMOUNT OF DAYS. IS THERE A TOOL TO DO THIS. CAN ANYONE HELP PLEASE.

EMADKB

Unfortunately - it does not seem to control deletion of the backup files!

It cleans out information from Datebase logs - but that is not really the problem.

At least from what we see - it does not delte the older files.

We have a cleanup running but older files do not go away.

Bob

It's happening to me too. In our maintanance plans we have clean up tasks set to remove old files but no files are ever deleted. Even running EXECUTE master.dbo.xp_delete_file 0,N'D:\SQL2005\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Backup',N'.bak',N'10/24/2006 13:12:32' manually still did not remove any files.

Anyone find a cure for this

thanks!

We've installed SP1 and SQL 2k5 does not delete the old .bak nor .trn backup files. SP1 gave us the checkbox for sub-folders, but it still won't delete the old backups.

Unfortunately my 60+ production databases aren't setup in your Lab and I don't have pre-release service pack 2 bits, so I need to know what MS is going to do to help people in the real world, like me, delete the old backups

I've never been too fond of Maintenance plans, there is only a limited amount of control with them. If I want the delete function for old backup files I use the -DelBkUps switch in the sqlmaint utility. Put this into a multi step SQL Agent job and you have ultimate control.

BOL - ms-help://MS.SQLCC.v9/MS.SQLSVR.v9.en/sqlcmpt9/html/937a9932-4aed-464b-b97a-a5acfe6a50de.htm

Change your code from

EXECUTE master.dbo.xp_delete_file 0,N'D:\SQL2005\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Backup',N'.bak',N'10/24/2006

to

EXECUTE master.dbo.xp_delete_file 0,N'D:\SQL2005\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Backup',N'bak',N'10/24/2006 13:12:32'

That worked for me it seemed that '.BAK' is not accepted and 'BAK' as extension is.

Daan Stam

You can use the "Maintenance Cleanup" task. You can then specify the location from which you want to delete the old files, you can also specify the file extensions. Also, you can select to include any subfolders for this cleanup.