The Art of SQL Server FILESTREAM - Red Gate Software

Chapter 8: Backup and Restore for FILESTREAM DatabasesOur complete backup scheme for the NorthPole database consists of a full backup, adifferential backup and two transaction log backups. With these backup files, we couldperform another restore operation to completely restore the NorthPole database;in other words, we could restore each backup file in sequence, rolling the databaseforward to the state it existed in at the end of the second log backup, and then recoverthe database. In fact, in this very simple case, we can perform a complete restore simplyusing the full backup and the two transaction log backups; remember that a log backupcaptures all contents in the log file since the last log backup and so, in this case, the firsttransaction log backup will contain the log records for both the rows added after the fullbackup, and the second log backup will contain the details of the final insert. In a morerealistic backup scheme, there would likely have been transaction log backups taken atregular intervals in the time between the full backup and the differential backup. In sucha case, the differential backup would have allowed us to avoid having to restore thoselog backups, and our restore operation would instead have used just the full backup, thedifferential backup, and any subsequent log backups.In any event, the problem we have here is that a complete restore would return thedatabase to the state where the contents of the Items table were deleted since, when werestore the second log backup, it would roll forward, not only the fourth insert, but alsothe transaction that deleted the contents of Items. What we want to do instead, to getall the contents of our Items table back, is restore to a specific point in time within thatsecond log backup; namely, the time that we recorded after the fourth insert, but beforethe accidental delete.Fortunately, SQL Server supports point-in-time recovery of FILESTREAM databases;when you restore a FILESTREAM-enabled database from a certain point in time, theFILESTREAM data will be consistent with the relational data in the restored database.Let's look at an example that performs a point-in-time restore of a FILESTREAMdatabase. This time, instead of restoring over the top of the existing NorthPoledatabase, we're going to restore to a new database, called NothPole2. At the end of thisoperation what we should have is a NorthPole database, with one row in the Itemstable, and a NorthPole2 database with all four rows back in the Items table.320