That is a very good point which I had neglected to mention! You read an article a thousand times thinking you've addressed everything...

In our situation we wanted to stick with an existing departmental guideline which puts each backup into its own subdirectory. While it seems inconsequential there are certain rules and precedents on the server which rely upon this setup. In my experimentation I couldn't get the maintenance cleanup task to traverse subdirectories properly by pointing to the parent directory (unless I was willing to create a new task for each subdirectory).