Applies to
ApexSQL Recover
Summary
What to do immediately after data loss in order to minimize the chance of the data being overwritten or lost beyond recovery, and therefore maximize recovery success rate.
Description
To recover lost data, ApexSQL Recover reads the database data file (MDF) and transaction log files (LDF). The information about truncated and dropped records can be read only from the MDF files. When a record is dropped, deleted, or truncated, it’s marked for overwriting in the MDF file. It will be overwritten by new database activity, and once that happens, ApexSQL Recover will not be able to recover the lost record. That’s why it is important to prevent overwriting of the MDF file.
- Set the database to the read-only state immediately after the data is lost. This will prevent overwriting of the MDF file and will enable you to copy the MDF and LDF files.
- Run ApexSQL Recover against the read-only database, or
- Copy the database MDF and LDF files, restore them as a new database, and run ApexSQL Recover against it.
- Select the most appropriate option from the Data Recovery options, if you know how your data was lost. If you do not know how the data was lost, try each option until you are successful in recovering your data. As long as the data has not yet been over-written by new data, ApexSQL will recover it.
Last updated
July 30, 2014
