Faster Database Recovery with Piecemeal Restores

The larger a database grows, the more difficult it becomes to restore it in a timely manner. When a database is young, you might be able to manage full restores in seconds. But as it matures and backup sizes go from megabytes to gigabytes to terabytes, those restore times will expand as well.

If you plan ahead, it’s not always a requirement to restore the entire database if only part of the database is necessary. This is where the idea of piecemeal restores can save you time and wasted effort.

What are Piecemeal Restores?

Piecemeal restores give you the option to restore a specific database filegroup or partition from a backup.

Rather than sweating it out while a full database backup restores, if you have your data divided into filegroups, you can restore only the filegroup that’s needed to get back up and running in a fraction of the time.

Make sure your data is separated into filegroups that make sense. You may find yourself in a situation where you need to restore HR related data. In that situation, you don’t want to be in the position where you have to wait on Sales data that’s grouped in with that same filegroup. That’s the type of issue you’re trying to avoid. If HR is in one filegroup and Sales is in another filegroup, it doesn’t matter how large or small Sales is. It’s just about restoring HR.

Plan and Test

As with any recovery strategy, test your process. Play out the scenario where data from a particular filegroup needs restored and practice restoring only that data. Document your process and consider tracking the restore times so that you’ll have a fair estimate if a real-life scenario pops up. Don’t wait until someone is breathing down your neck to try it out for the very first time.

For more details on piecemeal restores, check out the Microsoft article here.

Thanks for reading!