How to delete a Backup from a backup set in SQL Server 2008 R2

Question

The title pretty much sums it up. We are running out of space on our backup disks, and need to remove old backups out of the set. I can't seem to find any information on this.

Answer 1

I would change your backup strategy to write to individual files for each database backup. You could then have a maintenance plan step that examines your backup location and removes *.bak files older the X days.

Answer 2

There's no way (that I've ever heard of) to delete a single backup from a backup file. This is why people write each backup to a separate file so you can just delete the old files.

Answer 3

Well, if you really want to get a db with those selected items you could restore the database to a new database and choose the backups you want to keep whilst restoring.