Backup & Recovery from First Principles, Part 7: Page-Level Restore – Fixing 8 KB Instead of 8 TB
Storage corrupted one 8 KB page in a large table. One option: restore the entire database from backup, losing hours to I/O. The better option, when the damage is small and isolated: restore just that…
Backup & Recovery from First Principles, Part 6: Piecemeal Restores – Online Before It’s All Back
A 4 TB database is down. The application needs the 200 GB of hot transactional data; the 3.8 TB of archived history can wait until tomorrow. A standard restore makes everyone wait for all 4…
Backup & Recovery from First Principles, Part 5: Restore Sequences and the STOPAT Rewind
The first four parts of this series were about taking backups. This one is about the operation they all exist for. A restore sequence is a small program you write under pressure, and its grammar…
Backup & Recovery from First Principles, Part 4: Copy-Only Backups, the Chain-Safe Snapshot
ended with a rule: one tool owns log backups, and everything else takes COPY_ONLY. This part explains what copy-only backups actually change, proves it from msdb, and then builds the pattern that makes them genuinely…
Backup & Recovery from First Principles, Part 3: The Log Chain and How People Break It
showed that log backups form a linked list: each backup’s first_lsn equals the previous backup’s last_lsn. Point-in-time restore works by walking that list. Break one link and every log backup after the break is useless…
Backup & Recovery from First Principles, Part 2: Anatomy of a Backup
A backup file is not a copy of your MDF. It is a container with a precise contract: enough pages and enough log to reconstruct a transactionally consistent database as of the moment the backup…