Eduardo Pivaral walks us through what it takes to get point-in-time recovery of data in SQL Server:
Nowadays, data is a precious asset for companies today. If you are a database administrator (by decision or by mistake) or simply you are the “IT guy,” you have the mission of guarantee all the data is backed up and accessible for recovery.
Trust me, even when you could think you have the more reliable hardware on the planet, or you have multiple database replicas around the globe, anything can happen (a user deleting an entire schema by mistake, an application updating the wrong records, some process crashing, a lot of things can happen).
So trust me and don’t question me, just backup all your databases regularly.
During my time as a DBA, I think the most frequent reason for needing point-in-time backups was “We goofed up at 2:20 PM and need to get the database back to that state,” where goof-ups typically involved mass updates or deletes of data.