Maintenance Plan 1

[Waynest]

I have a plan which backs up a dozen small-ish dbs each night to tape.

My problem is that the backups are appended to the tape where I would rather just keep a single backup set on the tape (set of tapes in rotation) as the backups take progressively longer as the tape fills up.

I can't see anything which facilitates this in the plan properties.

How can I do this? The step in the job which runs the plan reads as follows:

EXECUTE master.dbo.xp_sqlmaint N'-PlanID CF892CF8-7651-11D5-A2BB-0090275135CE -Rpt "e:\mssql\LOG\No3 Maintenance Plan4.txt" -DelTxtRpt 5DAYS -WriteHistory -VrfyBackup -BkUpOnlyIfClean -CkDB -BkUpMedia TAPE -BkUpDB "\\.\Tape0" '

Is there something in here I can modify perhaps?

Thanks

 

[JayKusch]

Well, until someone comes up w/ a cleaner method, which I am sure there is, you could add another step to the job that the maintenance plan created. Call it something like BackupInit and use the following code:

BACKUP DATABASE Master
TO TAPE = '\\.\Tape0'
WITH INIT

Remember that once the new step is completed, you will need to escalate it to be Step1 before the step that runs you maintenance package.

This way you not only initialize the tape of all data prior to your backups, you are also getting the added benifit of backing up your master DB.

Thanks

J. Kusch

 

[Waynest]

Looks like it should work, thanks.