That'll Fix It!

So a user calls wanting help restoring a database file. That's an easy one and I'm always eager to help people that help protect themselves with diligent backups. The database file is really corrupted so there is no hope of recovering it.

We track down the backup files and I restore the first one that was taken about 3 days earlier. The restore process finishes and I notice the restored file has a date and time stamp of 10/31/2008. That's not a good sign. I look through the list of backup archives and they only go back about six weeks.

The user tries the restored database, but it fails and shows the same corruption error message. So the user has been backing up a corrupted file for over two months now. Yikes.

"Well, why don't you go ahead and restore the oldest archive and see if that one will work."

Yeah. That'll fix it.