What is the difference between "Maintenance Clean Up" and "Clean Up History" ?

Question

Just get a maintenance plan guide from vendor asking us to perform "Maintenance Clean Up" - Once a day, 3 days after last successful backup AND "Clean Up History" - Once a month.

We would like to seek your advice whether "Maintenance Clean Up" should be after "Transaction Log / Database Backup" ?  If it is run once a day, 3 days after last successful backup, does it mean that it will keep the database and transaction log backup for 3 days ?

On the other hand, what will be the "Clean Up History" ?  What will be cleaned up ?  Is there any SQL Script that I can run interactively to perform "Clean Up History" task ?

Your advice is sought.

Answer 1

Hi Tony,

Maintenance clean up task is to basically remove the old backups (.bak and .trn) after a specific interval.

History cleanup is to cleaup the history of the backups, maintenance plans etc.

What you need to do is to edit the current maintenance plan which does backup and add tasks ("maintenance clean up" and "cleanup history")which runs after the success of the backup tasks to do these tasks.

This Link gives you altenatives for cleaning up history.

HTH

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Regards, Ashwin Menon My Blog - http:\\sqllearnings.wordpress.com

Answer 2

Hi Tony,

            Using using Maintenance cleanup task we can we can delete .bak files,.trn and .txt files

using History cleanup task we can delete .bak,.trn , .txt files and also we can delete sql agent job historry which is available in error log file