Sometimes it is important to read the documentation before assuming things based on the text. This blog is the result of one of my quick interaction with a client who had an issue with Maintenance Plan which they created for backup files.
Pinal,
We are having issues with a maintenance plan. We have created plans to take log backup every 15 mins and configured it in such a way that it deletes the backup. The maintenance plan is running fine, but backups are not getting deleted. Do you have any ideas?
Within a few minutes, I replied to my blog which I wrote on similar behavior. SQL SERVER – Maintenance Plan – Maintenance Cleanup Task not Deleting Files
Their response made me laugh.
Pinal,
We have gone through the blog, but we are not using clean task. We have selected maintenance plan with the option “backup set will expire” to delete the old backup files. Do you think it’s a bug?
I replied with a one liner.
“Backup set will expire”, means an expiration date to indicate when the backup set can be overwritten by another backup not that the file/data is removed.
Please use a cleanup task to achieve what you want.
SOLUTION/WORKAROUND
To remove old backup files, we need to use maintenance plan cleanup task (refer my earlier blog). We might need to create two tasks. One to clean up the backup files and other to cleanup maintenance plan reports.
Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com)
First appeared on SQL SERVER – Maintenance Plan – Backup Files Not Getting Deleted