When a disaster hits, recovering lost data and structure is usually paramount. With ApexSQL Recover, the information inside the database (MDF) and transaction log (LDF) files is leveraged in order to create recovery scripts or to perform recovery tasks directly into a database and negate the data/structure loss. Once the recovery task is initiated, inadvertent or malicious changes can be identified, including the who made them and when, and then rolled back to the original state before they were ‘damaged’. Additionally, in many situations users need to extract information from huge backup files which is not always an easy task, and this is where ApexSQL Recover comes into play and simply extracts the data or structure from the backup without requiring or using a tremendous amount of resources used by the restore job which would otherwise be required.
Table of contents:
- Restores and recovery
Disaster recovery
Row-level recovery
Deleted, dropped or truncated data/structure recovery
Backup-less recovery
DDL recovery and replay
Point in time restores
SQL injection attacks
BLOB data recovery - Migration and restores
No downtime/data loss migrations
Zero data loss restores - Data and structure extraction
Extract directly from backup
BLOB extraction
Restores and recovery
Disaster recovery
In most cases, the recovery process starts by identifying inadvertent changes, who made then, where and when, and what has become of the original data/structure. The most critical task is to roll those changes back and return the data/structure to the original state predating the disaster. ApexSQL Recover provides insight into the transaction log files where they can be analyzed and investigated up to the row-level before the recovery (undo) script is created and executed to complete the recovery process.
Row-level recovery
Restoring a whole database or only specific tables is not a plausible solution in many cases because performing any restore task will result in data loss of all post-incident data changes that followed. With ApexSQL Recover, users can focus the recovery task only on the specific changes with pinpoint precision and ensure that the recovery process affects only specific table rows, ensuring that all other changes remain true and no data is lost as is the case with full object level restore or similar tasks.
Deleted, dropped or truncated data/structure recovery
Directly recover data lost due to delete, truncate or drop operations by creating an undo script or recovering directly to a new database. When recovering from drop operation, both structure and data losses can be recovered using ApexSQL Recover.
- How to recover SQL Server data from accidental DELETE, TRUNCATE and DROP operations
- 4 techniques for recovering lost tables due to DROP Table operation
- Recover data lost due to a TRUNCATE operation without backups
- Recover deleted SQL data from a backup or from online database files
- SQL Server disaster recovery – How to quickly recover data lost due to an Inadvertent delete operation
Backup-less recovery
Even with no backups, recovery may be possible. ApexSQL Recover utilizes information from within the transaction log file and database file to allow recovery by creating an undo script to rollback any inadvertent changes
DDL recovery and replay
Analyze transaction log files and create undo or redo scripts to roll changes back and forward.
Point in time restores
Choose specific database tables, or even whole databases and restore them back in time with ApexSQL Recover by creating undo scripts which can rollback any/all changes made during the specified time period and return selected objects to their previous state, as if the later changes never happened.
SQL injection attacks
Being a target of a SQL injection attack can have a serious impact. With ApexSQL Recover, identifying SQL injection attacks is quick and easy. Analyze the transactions and individual operations to determine the data that was changed and damaged, up to the row-level, and create rollback scripts to reverse the changes and completely reverse negative impact from the malicious attack.
BLOB data recovery
Recovering lost BLOB data is quick and easy with ApexSQL Recover. Lost BLOBs are recovered directly as data files, making it easy to get them back to the database or immediately check the files out of the database.
Migration and restores
No downtime/data loss migrations
Restoring a database backup to a specific point in time will result in a full loss any changes made after the backup was created. With ApexSQL Recover, a redo script can be created to replay these changes after the restore job is successfully finished in order to ensure no data is lost in the process.
Data and structure extraction
Extract directly from backup
To look into a database backup using SQL Server own tools, one must first completely restore the backup as a database, using a large amount of resources in the process. With ApexSQL Recover, users can simply look into their database backups, and extract table data for the specific object only, using minimal resources and time.
BLOB extraction
Directly extract BLOB files from a SQL database as data files with ApexSQL Recover.
November 2, 2018
