Clive Strong tells a tale about a mental flub while restoring a backup:
Our automated restore process works really nicely. We take full backups on Saturday and differential backups through the week. We also take log backups through the day, but we were not going to be restoring those for this task. We have a number of internal platforms we restore to in full (or in part following a cut down process) so which gives us good validation of our backup files on a regular basis. We also have regular test restores from tape just for good measure.
However, a while ago I was asked to build a new server and restore the databases up to a specific date. We didn’t need a point in time restore, just to a specific day, so I pulled the full and differentials and wrote the script to do the restore for me. The script restored the full backup and the differential backup for Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. I gave it the once over and executed the script. A while later and I came back and it was unexpectedly, still running. I eventually left the office and noted it finished in the early hours and ran for many hours longer than I had anticipated.
Read on for Clive’s more detailed explanation of the whoopsie moment.