Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

Reverting to a Snapshot for Recovery Purposes

Probably the most basic usage of database snapshots is decreasing recovery time of a database by restoring a troubled database with a database snapshot—referred to as reverting. As Figure 28.6 shows, one or more regularly scheduled snapshots can be generated during a 24-hour period, effectively providing you with data recovery milestones that can be rapidly used. As you can see in this example, four database snapshots are six hours apart (6:00 a.m., 12:00 p.m., 6:00 p.m., and 12:00 a.m.). Each is dropped and re-created once per day, using the same snapshot name. Any one of these snapshots can be used to recover the source database rapidly in the event of a logical data error (such as rows deleted ...