Backup and the evil RETAINDAYS option

Posted by TiborKaraszi on SQL Blog See other posts from SQL Blog or by TiborKaraszi
Published on Sun, 08 Jul 2012 12:25:00 GMT Indexed on 2012/07/08 15:20 UTC
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backup

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datetime

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Maintenance

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SQL Server Agent

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tools

"So what bad has this option done?", you probably as yourself. Well, not much, but I find it evil because it confuses people, especially those new to SQL Server. I have many times seen people specifying something like 3, and expect SQL Server to keep the three most recent backups in the backup file and overwrite everything which is older than that. Well, that is not what the option does. But before we go into details, let's look at an example backup command which is using this option: BACKUP DATABASE...(read more)

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