May 19, 2008 at 9:44 am
I am running a maintenance plan to do a complete backup and a transaction log backup. The problem is the backups are filling up my hard drive. I went ahead and changed it to delete files older than two weeks. Everyday it backs up a little over 5GB. Will it create problems to delete these transaction logs to clear up some space?
May 19, 2008 at 10:58 am
You mean delete the transaction log backup files, right? You DON'T want to delete the transaction logs themselves. Deleting the backup files will affect how far back in time you can recover the database to using the disk files.
If you copy the backup files from disk to tape or some other media, and you can afford the time it takes to restore from tape back to disk before restoring a database, it's okay to delete the disk files. For example, if you need to recover the database to a point in time two week ago but you only keep backups on disk for one week, you'll have to get them back from tape then restore the database.
Greg
May 19, 2008 at 3:28 pm
You may have a FULL backup and remove all transactional backups prioir to the FULL backup. However, in this case, you will not be able to restore to the point before the FULL backup. You can restore your databse to any point after the FULL backup.
May 22, 2008 at 9:27 am
do you backup to tape once a week ?
if so why not set it to delete logs older than 1week. which probably wont save much on disk costs.
I have setup my backups to do the following
8 transaction log backups a day overwritten everyday.
1 full backup every day. overwritten everyday.
I had the same type of problem you had but if you can take a full backup at the start or end of the day the previous transaction log backups will not be needed to restore the DB, you will need the full backup from the current day and then any additional TR log backup created after the full to recover the db.
May 23, 2008 at 11:27 am
Another option would be to back up to the newtork. On my maintenance plans, I just reference the server share I want to backup to via UNC instead of a local drive \\servername\share\ instead of d:\backups\ and everything works fine. That frees up the space on your SQL Server to allow the backups and allows you to keep several days worth of backups available on disk.
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