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It's a
common business need that you want to retain only a certain number
of backups at any given time. The standard T-SQL BACKUP syntax does
not have any file retention options. SQL Server maintenance plans
do offer you the option to delete old backup files, but that is a
maintenance plan option and not part of the BACKUP syntax.
With SQL Backup, you can specify the number of backups to retain in
the BACKUP command itself. Backup files older than this retention
period are deleted, and only when the current backup has completed
successfully.
For e.g. the following command will delete all full database backup
files for the AdventureWorks in the 'g:\backups\' directory that
are older than 2 days.
You can also provide the retention period in hours, by appending a
'h' qualifier. For e.g. the following command will delete all
backup files older than 2 hours.
If you would rather specify a retention period in terms of backup
sets, that is also possible in SQL Backup. Just append the 'b'
qualifier to the retention period. For e.g. the following command
will retain only 2 full database backup sets of the AdventureWorks
database in the 'g:\backups\' directory, and delete any extras.
This is certainly much easier than writing batch file commands,
Powershell scripts and the like.
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Document history
| 7/4/2010 | Initial release. |
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