To cut down a potentially laborious task of converting backup tasks in several maintenance plans to use SQL Backup we now have got a utility for doing it for you. It’s not part of the install of SQL Backup, but it may be included in a future release. For now you can download it separately from http://labs.red-gate.com/index.php/Maintenance_Plan_Conversion_Wizard.

The conversion process involves identifying which plans you want to convert, then configuring the backup task to utilize SQL Backup functionality. This means you can set up compression and encryption while maintaining the common features of the native backup task.

This tool will convert maintenance plans on SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005.