TDP for SQL differential restore fails

[manofmilk]

Help!

We have set up full/diff backups of some of our SQL servers and are now trying to run a restore. The restore needs to leave the production databse alone so we are usuing 'restore into' and 'relocate' which works fine. No matter what settings we use though the 'full' part of the restore always succeeds but then we can't get the differential portion to apply. We get errors like:

"Data is not in the correct state to have this differential backup applied to it.

Using the GUI (TDP for SQL version 5.2.1.0) how should we run this restore:
First the full and then the diff or with both ticked at the same time?
What options should be slected for the restore(s) (i.e. 'recovery', 'partial restore', 'replace' etc)?

Any help gratefully recieved!

Cheers.

 

[manofmilk]

Progress....?

Right, now we've found if we select the difffull from the left hand side of the GUI it does automatically select the correct full, which it didn't if we used the right hand side.

If we run the restore with only the 'recovery' option ticked we get this error after the 'full' has restored successfully:

Restore failed [Microsoft][ODBC SQL server drive] Cannont apply the backup on device 'TDPSQL-00001c38-0000' to database 'databasename'.

Its a different error but still not much help...

 

[jmcgheenc]

recovery options

1) restore the full database with "no recovery", the database will be in "recovery" status... Then restore the diff "with recovery".
2) keep in mind that the full backup is linked to the diff backup by a series of transaction logs, and if you have done a full backup between the two you will break that trx log chain.
3) When I've done this I always used the console commands, but you are redirecting to another database so that adds another level of complexity I have not tried.

 

[manofmilk]

Thanks but no luck; same sort of errors, the full part always restores fine but then the diff part won't. We also tried using the 5.5 GUI to run the restore but that failed as well. It won't even let you select a 'diffull' on its own, it always picks the correct full to go with it.

 

[manofmilk]

Dag Nam it

Looks like we suffered from 'distinct lack of joined up IT' syndrome: turns out this was the problem:

http://www.sqlskills.com/BLOGS/PAUL...Y-how-to-avoid-breaking-the-backup-chain.aspx

Now our question is - does anybody know how to 'hack' a partial SQL restore to make the LSNs agree??