Administration Basics: Point in time recovery

Nowadays, data is a precious asset for companies today. If you are a database administrator (by decision or by mistake) or simply you are the "IT guy," you have the mission of guarantee all the data is backed up and accessible for recovery. Trust me, even when you could think you have the more reliable hardware on the planet, or you have multiple database replicas around the globe, anything can happen (a user deleting an entire schema by mistake, an application updating the wrong records, some process crashing, a lot of things can happen). So trust me and don't question me, just backup all your databases regularly. The Backup/restore strategy is a broad topic, so for this post, we will focus on the restore activity, so if you don't know how to back up a database yet, you can start here . What do we need to know? I like to think of the SQL backups like a pyramid, like this: Pyramid of backups For restoring your database to a particular time, you mu