Maintenance Plans - Backups and Removing Old Files

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Maintenance Plans - Backups and Removing Old Files

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Andy Warren

Posted Monday, June 03, 2002 12:00 AM

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Comments posted to this topic are about the content posted at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/awarren/maintenanceplansbackupsandremovingoldfiles.asp>http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/awarren/maintenanceplansbackupsandremovingoldfiles.asp

Andy
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Post #4595

Jeremy

Posted Monday, June 10, 2002 4:11 AM

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You say:
"Now you'd think...really...that it would make sense to delete the files first, then do the backup?"

I would say that that would absolutely make no sense at all, and I thank MS on my bare knees (as a manner of speaking :) that they agree with me. It would be very bad to delete the previous backup unless you were 100% sure that the new backup was OK (that is: written to disk and preferably verified too). Otherwise if the backup failed it would be possible to end up without a valid backup since the older one was already deleted.

I think that if you choose to keep 2 old backups, you should know that you are guaranteed to have those, even if the last backup failed for some reason. In your scenario, if a backup failed, the older one would already have been deleted. Backups are just to important to take such gambles with!

Post #34935

Andy Warren

Posted Monday, June 10, 2002 4:34 AM

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I sorta see your point, but ultimately what you dont have is a current backup, which to me is a far greater problem!

Andy
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/awarren/

Andy
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Post #34936

David Benoit

Posted Monday, June 10, 2002 6:44 AM

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Have to agree with Andy on this one. Rather loose two days ago backup and try to get a good current one.

Anyway, thanks for finding this out Andy! Good to know.

David

David

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Post #34937

glacroix

Posted Tuesday, September 07, 2004 8:14 AM

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Hi Andy,

I have been having a problem with the maintenance plan where it does not remove transaction logs older than the specified number of days set in the properties. In one plan, i have 5 databases manually selected and i have enabled the transaction log backup once a week and the plan is supposed to remove the .trn files older than a week. However, only 2 databases are showing .trn files and those .trn files are never deleted, and just keep adding up week by week. Other plans are working fine. Do you have any idea what could be causing this? Do i need to limit one plan per db when backing up the transaction log?

thanks,

Guy

Post #135638

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