Aaron Bertrand has a quick-and-easy method of restoring databases in a Docker container:
I have been using Docker containers for local development and testing for some time now; I first blogged about my steps into this brave new world back in late 2016. Most of the time, I just need to create some throwaway database, with a throwaway table, to prove a point or to validate an answer I’ve supplied.
Sometimes, though, I need to work with a real database. It’s a little trickier to do this in a container, because it’s isolated — I can’t just attach or restore from my Downloads folder. I could fire up a VM and attach there, but I actually don’t even use Parallels on my work laptop, and I find that using VMs leads to response times that are a lot more sluggish across the board.
It’s not too difficult to get files into your containers, provided your instance will have a total size less than the size of the container, and this quick tutorial proved to be very helpful.
Read on for the walkthrough. Aaron notes that this is a Mac-specific walkthrough, though the Windows and Linux versions are pretty similar as well, as we still create persistent volumes.