Deleting Files with a Specified Extension in a Folder Using Maintenance Plan(Maintenance Cleanup Task)

dbtut January 12, 2019 MSSQL

We perform maintenance operations on SQL Server using Maintenance Plan. This article describes how to delete files with a specified extension in a folder. I will share links to articles of other processes that can be done using the Maintenance Plan at the end of the article.

From the Management tab under SSMS, we select Maintenance Plans and Maintenance Plan Wizard as shown below.

On the next screen, select “Do not show this starting page again” as follows and click Next.

We give a name to the Maintenance Plan from the Name section as follows on the incoming screen. I named DeleteOldBackup.

Then click Change in the Schedule section. A screen appears as follows.

From Occurs you can choose Daily, Weekly or Monthly.

Select Daily if you want this maintenance plan to run daily
Select Weekly if you want this maintenance plan to run weekly
Select Monthly if you want this maintenance plan to run monthly

In the Schedule section, we click on Change to set it to run once every week on Sunday at 00:00.

On the next screen, we will delete the files with the specified extension in a folder, so we select Maintenance Cleanup Task as below and click next.

In the following screen,

If you select Backup files, it deletes the backup files before the specified date in a folder.

If you select Maintenance Plan text reports, it deletes the reports of the maintenance plans before the specified date.

Deletes a specified file if we select Delete spesific file in File Location.

If we select Search folder and delete files based on an extension, it deletes records from files specified in folder before the specified date with the extension specified in file extension.

In the next screen, if you select “Write a report to a text file” as below, it will create a report in the folder you selected in Folder location.

If you select the E-mail report option, it will send the reports to the e-mail address you specified in the To: section.

Since I have no operator defined on my server, I got an error like the following.

There are no operators defined on the system.

You may want to read my article “How To Create An Operator On SQL Server” to get detailed information about the operator. Finish the process by clicking Next and Finish.