You'll not find very much SharePoint knowledge here. Most of us avoid it like the plague.

You didn't mention which version of SharePoint you're running and I suspect the 2005...

You want to add a Maintenance Plan Cleanup task instead of adjusting the media-set retention period.

Brandie, had you posed this question 2 weeks ago I would have said "no, never heard of it".

Maybe the company's primary responsibility is disaster recovery. In that case,...

As I was first reading Steve's editorial I was thinking, "Sure that would be nice but they probably don't have the resources to throw at it. Nice-to-haves don't usually get...

Yep, new in 2012. Data Tools as opposed to BIDS. It's kind...

Most folks here, myself included, are going to suggest you talk directly to MS or your vendor for licensing questions. It can get pretty complex.

MS has a Licensing Guide.

Personally, I'd go with Powershell for this. Server 2003 will need it installed if it's not already (it's an optional update). 2008 ships with it installed.

http://www.simple-talk.com/content/article.aspx?article=1339

Also don't forget the difference in row delimiter for Unix files. Windows typically uses CRLF as the end-of-line character. In Unix, it's typically LF.

Just out of curiosity, was the Agent job running the TSQL commands you specified directly? Or was it executing a backup task via a Maintenance Plan? I've recently seen perfectly...

Good one Tony. I forgot about RESTORE HEADERONLY.

How is the flat file being generated? Even if the data is not included, you should still be getting a blank string for the field so the comma would just...

Lowell is right. If you don't need the field, then leave FuelSurcharge out of the CSV altogether. We are, of course, assuming you have control over the generation...

My first thought was that the process was appending backups. However, INIT and SKIP options imply that it should be overwriting any old backups.

What happens if you try to...

Is this at all helpful? http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqljourney/archive/2012/06/26/backup-database-results-in-error-could-not-clear-differential-bitmap-in-database.aspx

Gus is right, quite a few applications use SQL Express as their backend these days. One I can think of is Symantec's BackupExec software.