Proving the Restore, Part 13: Two Vocabularies for the Same Backup
This series has used two sources for the same information. msdb records what the instance did. RESTORE HEADERONLY reads what’s in the files. They describe the same backups and disagree on almost every name. Code…
Proving the Restore, Part 7: One File, Hundreds of Backup Sets
Point RESTORE HEADERONLY at a full backup and you get one row. Point it at the file a fifteen-minute log backup job has been appending to since Sunday and you get several hundred. Each row…
Proving the Restore, Part 1: The Backup Job Said Success
A maintenance window rebooted a server in the middle of its weekly full backup. The job was killed mid-write, the partial file was discarded, and the next scheduled run was seven days out. Differentials kept…
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…