Presents your 
SQL SERVER E-NEWSLETTER for May 8, 2003

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RESTORE FROM A DIFFERENTIAL BACKUP

A differential backup records data changes made between full database
backups and can be particularly useful in databases where a relatively
small amount of data has changed or where the data is modified many times
since the last full database backup.

The process for using differential backups involves creating a full
database back up schedule and then doing multiple differential backups
between these larger, full database backups.

Follow these three steps to restore your database:

1. Restore the most recent database backup.
2. Restore the last differential database backup.
3. If you use the full or bulk-logged recovery model, apply all
transaction log backups created since the last differential backup was 
created.

In this example, we'll restore a database, a differential database, and
the transaction log backup of the MyNwind database.

First we have to restore the full database by specifying the original
full backup and NORECOVERY, which allows subsequent restore operations to
proceed:

RESTORE DATABASE MyNwind
             FROM MyNwind_1
             WITH NORECOVERY
GO

Next, we'll restore the differential database backup, the second backup
on the MyNwind_1 backup device:

RESTORE DATABASE MyNwind
            FROM MyNwind_1
            WITH FILE = 2,
                      NORECOVERY
GO

Finally, we'll restore each transaction log backup that was created
after the differential database backup:

RESTORE LOG MyNwind
             FROM MyNwind_log1
             WITH NORECOVERY
GO

RESTORE LOG MyNwind
            FROM MyNwind_log2
            WITH RECOVERY
GO

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