One off backup between Full backups and the transaction logs

  • To start, I'm fairly new to all this and I might be wrong so I figured I would ask people who have been doing this for a lot longer than I have.

    I have one person telling me that it's fine to take a full backup in between the my scheduled full backups and that if I need to do a point in time restore there won't be an issue, example to follow:

    Full backup 1 @ 10:00pm on Friday

    Transaction logs every half hour

    One-off backup @ 2AM on Saturday (which they then deleted)

    Next full backup 2 @ 10:00pm on Saturday

    They say I can do a point in time restore to 1:00PM on Saturday using full backup 1 from Friday and the transactions logs up to 1:00pm before Full backup 2 Saturday night.

    I have someone else telling me that because a full backup was taken @ 2AM I can't use the transaction log files after 2AM without starting w/that full backup.

    I understand that there is an option for Copy_Only but that was not used in this scenario, just a regular full backup taken in the "middle" of the day.

    Thank you

  • copy_only full backup is only relevant to differential backups, as they do not reset the LSN base for the differential.

    You can start from the friday 10pm backup and do a point in time recovery to 1pm the next day. This is because you use transaction log backups to 'roll through' full backups as full backups do not truncate the transaction log therefore you maintain a continuous chain of LSNs.

    You need an initial full backup, but if you did a full backup every night for ever, as long as you had the initial full backup and all the transaction log backups since you could recover to the present time starting from that initial followed only by all the transaction log backups in sequence.

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