Disaster Recovery Procedures in SQL Server 2005 Part 1

SQL Server 2005 has given us a lot of options on implementing high availability and disaster recovery. More than the technologies themselves, it is important to come up with the proper procedures as we manage different disaster recovery scenarios. How do we come up with procedures for various SQL Server disaster recovery scenarios?

This series of articles will look at different disaster recovery scenarios and the procedures involved in your recovery plan. When considering disaster recovery options for your SQL Server 2005 database, you should include as many technologies as you can so you'll have a pool of options to choose from if a disaster arises. While having these technologies prove to be important, it is the process that goes with it that makes it effective. For this article, let's take a simple scenario where a user accidentally dropped or truncated a table about 5 hours after a database backup was taken. Restoring from a database backup would mean losing 5 hours worth of data. And for most companies, they would rather opt for loss of time than loss of data. Plus, if this was a very large database, it would take quite some time to recover and bring it online. We'll take this scenario to build a procedural approach to recover the database as quickly as possible while minimizing data loss. We will use the Northwind database to demonstrate the process. Remember to change Northwind's database recovery model to FULL before working through the steps below.

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