Smart Cleanup Policies
Smart Cleanup Policies provides a convenient way to remove old LiteSpeed backups. It removes full and differential backup files and optionally transaction log backups based on a user-defined period. LiteSpeed will ignore copy-only backups except on secondary replicas in AlwaysOn Availability groups, in which case it will allow deletions.
Smart Cleanup Policies is backup set aware and will never remove a full backup that is needed by a differential backup that is not being deleted.
The backup retention will never delete:
- The backup files, if there are mixed backups in the same backup file. For example, if a user performs a backup of AdventureWorks and Pubs into the same mybackups.bak backup file.
- The full backup, if there are associated differential or t-log backups in the backup set that are not eligible for cleanup.
- File/FileGroup backups
- File/FileGroup differential backups
- Partial backups
- Partial differential backups
-
Files that have the filesystem archive bit set (if that option is selected)
NOTE: Fast Compression does not raise errors if it detects a missing backup from a backup set that was removed via the cleanup process.
The diagram below shows how the LiteSpeed components communicate to SQL Server to check if backups are eligible for cleanup and delete them each time Smart Cleanup Policies runs.
To configure Smart Cleanup Policies in Wizards
- Open existing or create a new backup template. For more information, see Create Backup Templates.
- Open or create the Fast Compression Database task in a maintenance plan. For more information, see About Creating Maintenance Plans.
- Run the Backup wizard and select the Fast Compression backup type. For more information, see Back Up Databases.
To run Smart Cleanup Policies manually, do one of the following:
- Use the xp_slsSmartCleanup extended stored procedure. For more information, see xp_slsSmartCleanup.
- Create a Smart Cleanup Backup Files maintenance plan task. For more information, see Smart Cleanup Backup Files.
- Run slsSmartCleanup.exe with the appropriate arguments from the command-line. For more information, see SmartCleanup Command-Line Arguments.