I am always notified by my blog readers whenever they see something unusual and I try to help them so that I can learn something new. Recently, one of my blog reader told that his drive is getting filled with the regular backups taken via SQL Server Maintenance Plans.
My simple answer was – You should delete or move older backups and Maintenance Cleanup Task is available in the Toolbox. And I was shocked when he said that he already has that task, but it is not working as expected. It is supposed to delete files with extension “bak” which are 7 days old, but its not deleting any of those files. My next question was – is there any error message? The answer was – “When I run the job, it gives me a success message, but older .bak files are still present.”
I asked him to look into the log files generated by maintenance plan. They are generated under LOG folder (which contains SQL ERRORLOGs as well). Here is what was shared.
Microsoft(R) Server Maintenance Utility (Unicode) Version 12.0.2381
Report was generated on “local”.
Maintenance Plan: MaintenancePlan
Duration: 00:00:00
Status: Succeeded.
Details:
Maintenance Cleanup Task (local)
Maintenance Cleanup on Local server connection
Cleanup Database Backup files
Age: Older than 4 Weeks
Task start: 2014-10-28T10:14:59.
Task end: 2014-10-28T10:14:59.
Success
Command:EXECUTE master.dbo.xp_delete_file 0,N”E:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL12.SQL2014\MSSQL\Backup”,N”.bak”,N”2014-09-30T10:14:59”
GO
When I configured the plan on my machine and looked at the log, I got similar output. There is a little difference there. Notice the extension of the file given as .bak (notice a dot before bak). I have highlighted in the output.
Then I asked my friend to share the screenshot of the cleanup task and here is what he shared.
And that was the problem. I asked him to keep bak as extension (by removing dot before it) and run the below command.
EXECUTE MASTER.dbo.xp_delete_file 0,N'E:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL12.SQL2014\MSSQL\Backup',N'bak',N'2014-09-30T10:14:59'
GO
The command is same as what was shown in the log file. I have just replaced two single quotes with one single quote. As soon as that was run, all BAK files older than 2014-09-30T10:14:59 got deleted successfully.
Moral of the story: Doesn’t use dot before the extension of the file in the UI.
Reference: Pinal Dave (https://blog.sqlauthority.com)
