I am trying to delete old files using the Maintenance Cleanup Task after the Backup Database Task, but the files do not get deleted as they should.

After the SQL backup job runs, I have a separate Windows Scheduled task (running several hours after the backups) that archives the .BAK files into .7z (7-Zip) files. The maintenance task should delete the .7z files if they are older than 1 week:

EXECUTE master.dbo.xp_delete_file 0,N'D:\Database Backups',N'7z',N'2008-07-28T10:54:59',1

The task is set to the correct folder, and it includes first-level subfolders. the file extension is set to:
7z

An example filename is:
MyDatabase_backup_200808040600.7z

What am I missing?

Thanks!

Chris

XP_Delete_File is an undocumented procedure that is used internally. xp_delete_file, in particular has all sorts of quirks. Having said that, have you tried changing the first parameter to a 1?

I changed the first parm to 1 and it still did not delete the files.

http://www.simple-talk.com/community/forums/thread/31948.aspx !

I usually use xp_cmdshell for this. Naughty but dead reliable. The big problem is that the date in the DIR listing is of a different format depending on your country settings. This means that you can't just cut and paste a routine like this and expect it to work!

Thanks Phil.

It seemed like a simple thing when I started...