Need to find and delete existing backups, then modify maintenance plan to delete old backups
I have a disk space problem on a SQL Server 2008 system caused by a maintenance plan (which I did not create) which does daily backups, creating new backup files with each backup. The plan does nothing to delete old backups, with the result that I am running out of disk space.
I am not an experienced SQL Server DBA; I have never used the Maintenance Plan Wizard or the editor that is used to modify existing maintenance plans, so any instructions will have to be fairly detailed.
Problem 1: I need to find where the backup files are, so that I can see how big they are , so that I can decide how many of them I need to delete, as an immediate manual cleanup. I could find them with Windows explorer on the server, and see how big they are, but I suspect that deleting them at that point would not be a good idea. How can I find and manually delete these backups with the SQL Server Management Studio? I expect that it should be possible, but I have found nothing yet by digging through the Object explorer and the multitude of subitems and menus.
Problem 2: editing the existing backup maintenance plan so that it deletes old backups when new ones are created. As I said above, I have never created or modified a maintenance plan. I can see from answered questions that I need to do a Modify on the existing maintenance plan and add a Cleanup Task, but I see that there are two kinds of Cleanup Task available: History Cleanup Task and Maintenance Cleanup task. I need to know which one I should use and detailed instructions as to how I should integrate it into the existing plan. I can drag one of the tasks from the toolbox into the design pane, but I have no idea of what to do next. (The amount of documentation and help files in SQL Server Management Studio is so large and poorly indexed as to be useless.)
I am not an experienced SQL Server DBA; I have never used the Maintenance Plan Wizard or the editor that is used to modify existing maintenance plans, so any instructions will have to be fairly detailed.
Problem 1: I need to find where the backup files are, so that I can see how big they are , so that I can decide how many of them I need to delete, as an immediate manual cleanup. I could find them with Windows explorer on the server, and see how big they are, but I suspect that deleting them at that point would not be a good idea. How can I find and manually delete these backups with the SQL Server Management Studio? I expect that it should be possible, but I have found nothing yet by digging through the Object explorer and the multitude of subitems and menus.
Problem 2: editing the existing backup maintenance plan so that it deletes old backups when new ones are created. As I said above, I have never created or modified a maintenance plan. I can see from answered questions that I need to do a Modify on the existing maintenance plan and add a Cleanup Task, but I see that there are two kinds of Cleanup Task available: History Cleanup Task and Maintenance Cleanup task. I need to know which one I should use and detailed instructions as to how I should integrate it into the existing plan. I can drag one of the tasks from the toolbox into the design pane, but I have no idea of what to do next. (The amount of documentation and help files in SQL Server Management Studio is so large and poorly indexed as to be useless.)
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Anuj
In maintenance plan itself has a tool "Maintenance Cleanup task" where you have the option to delete old files (including backup file).
