I said it in the previous chapter, and I will say it again, a backup is good only if you can use it to restore. Ideally, you will never need it, but a restore process needs to be

documented, tested, and practiced. Practicing allows for errors to occur and for you to document strange things that can happen so that in a moment of panic and needing to complete the restore under pressure, you will be able to remain calm.

It will also help verify that there are good backups available. One more benefit is that it allows you to be able to think through ways to get up and running very quickly.

I have heard so many stories of tape backups not being available or that the previous night’s backups failed so a day of data loss is the minimum.

Practicing restoring allows for other solutions to be put into place to protect from these horror stories of not being able to recover or get the data back from a disaster or even errors.

Files can get corrupted, areas can be flooded, and hardware failures can happen.

Most situations in which you need to restore and recover will not be as bad as that, though.

Even in places where there are safeguards and little natural disasters, there always seems to be something that occurs to make you want to test the recovery and validate the backups.

With this in mind, there is a need for the following:

•     A backup strategy

•     A DBA with backup and recovery skills

•     A restore and recovery strategy, including a requirement to test the restore and recovery periodically

This chapter will walk you through the restore and recovery process along with the common tasks you will have to perform when dealing with media failures.