T-SQL Tuesday #85 – Restoring the Backups

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday’s topic is about backup and restores. Thanks to Kenneth Fisher (b|t) for hosting this month!

The day before the topic was announced, I was working with another database system and I just wanted to do a simple backup and restore so I could reset my test database back to the point before my mistake in the script I was working on screwed things up. And I couldn’t do it. This wasn’t covered in the introductory admin class I took for this database system and I was feeling too dumb to figure out how to do it after doing a Google search on the subject. Backups and restores were some of the first skills I learned as a SQL Server DBA so it just never made sense to me that it wasn’t for other systems. On the most basic level, it’s about protecting your data – why is it not the first thing you learn? Maybe that’s just me….

There are a lot of details that can go into creating a backup strategy. But I want to talk about restores. Why? Because you do backups so you can restore them. (If I could remember who I heard this line from, I would give them full credit. But it’s too great of a line not use because it so true.)

In particular, I wanted to think about the reasons why we restore.

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