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copied!<p>Three options, depending on your environment and needs:</p> <ol> <li>If you're using SQL2005 or 2008, you can almost certainly write a CLR stored procedure to do this job. If you haven't done it before, it's probably more work than you're looking to do, but since I already have a project I could add this to, it's probably what I would do if I really needed SQL to be able to read from a directory.</li> <li>As Sam suggests, if you have access to the source of the backups, you can query the tables in the MSDB database. My suggestion might be to query msdb.dbo.backupmediafamily.physical_device_name to get a list of files that <em>might</em> be in available to you, then test if they exist by using: <code>RESTORE FILELISTONLY disk='FULL_PATH_TO_YOUR_FILE'</code>. This throws a non-fatal error if the file doesn't exist. You can check for an error in T-SQL by testing if @@error is non-zero. </li> <li>If your environment makes it possible, a quick script running in Windows, outside of SQL Server, might be your best bet. You can set it up as a scheduled task if you need to. You could, for example, have it run every 15 minutes, check if a file has appeared since the last time the script ran, and insert any files into a table in SQL Server. I've done similar-enough tasks in Perl, Ruby, and VBScript. It could probably be done with a batch file, too. Again, I don't know your exact needs or skillset, but if I just needed to get this done, and didn't 100% need it to run from within SQL Server, I'd probably just write a script.</li> </ol>

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