I was playing around with SQL Server Integration Services to create a parameterized package to copy the latest production backup file to a dev server and then restore the backup to the dev server. It's not that hard to do manually but thought it would be a simple example to try out SSIS. Got my package designed and working fine when executed directly from SQL Server. I was passing in three variables (source directory, destination directory and database name). When I took the next step and created a job to run my package I ran into an error. Kept getting error messages about invalid characters in the path. Since I was setting the variable values the exact same way as I did when manually executing the package, I couldn't figure out. After adding some logging to write out the variable values from my script task which copied the backup file from the production server to the dev server I found my answer. The "path" variables I was setting ended in a backslash. When the SQL job executed, the trailing backslash was acting as an escape character and thus my variable values were getting all messed up. The solution was simple. Instead of "C:\Temp\" for example, I just changed the value in the Set Values option to "C:\Temp\\" and all was well.