Today, thanks to a customer, I discovered  one of those annoying little things that can really drive you nuts.

Basically, they were trying to restore a backup using the SSMS Restore Database window and they kept getting “No backupset selected to be restored” whenever a backup file was selected.

You just had to select a file for restore and click OK…

… to be met with an error message in the Restore Database window:

The weird thing about it is that the backup file restored perfectly fine from a T-SQL script:

So it had to be something wrong with SSMS, but what?

Looking closer at the restore script, one thing stands out. Look at the file name:

Yep, there’s a leading whitespace in the file name. Could that be the source of the problem?

Let’s try again with the GUI in a slightly different way. This time I will copy the folder path from the “Backup File Location” textbox…

… and paste it directly in the “File name” textbox, right before the file name:

This time everything works as expected.

Bottom line:

1. This is a bug in SSMS: go on and vote this Connect item to have it fixed in a future version.
2. Don’t use the GUI to restore a database.
3. Don’t use the GUI at all.