Log History Purge

appwright

How do you purge the backup history that the GUI interface shows when it comes up? I have about 400 DB's that get backed up every night and my log is so huge it takes forever for the program to come up.

Is there a way to tell the software to only keep 14 days of logs?

petey

There isn't any way to manage the activity history from the GUI.

I've prepared a small utility, that you can use to purge records older than x days. Note that this is NOT a Red Gate product, and comes with absolutely no warranty whatsoever. I would suggest making a backup of the data file, before running this utility for the first time.

You can find the data file in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Red Gate\SQL Backup\Data, assuming your system drive is C:.

Usage is

trimdata <days to retain>

To retain the last 14 days of activity history, use

trimdata 14

You can download the file from http://www.yohz.com/downloads/trimdata.zip

appwright

Thank you very much!! Is there any way to get this functionality included in the next release that is due out soon?

petey

In version 4, there is no longer a separate activity data file. All activity history will be obtained from the regular msdb tables, with SQL Backup specific data embedded in a couple of columns.

The activity history display will be limited to the first 400 rows each for backup and restore, whether it be for the entire server, or for specific databases.

Deletion wise, there is an option to run the msdb..sp_delete_backuphistory stored procedure after each SQL Backup process, to manage the msdb database size.

appwright

That's a great way to deal with it. Thanks.