One of the many skills needed by DBAs today is the ability to restore a database from backup using point in time recovery.  This option is only available if you are using the full or bulk-logged recovery model (see my post on recovery models).   The default time shown is the ‘most recent possible’ which works in most scenarios.

Why would I need to restore to a point in time?  There are many different reasons, one being that you noticed through your monitoring or logs that things went south at a certain point in time.  Therefore, we want to restore a minute or two prior to that time.  Another scenario that I have seen is that a change is made in an application in production at a certain time.  They now want those changes demoted down into a testing environment.  In this scenario we would want to make sure our restore includes that point.

How do I do it?  In the restore database dialog, you select the ellipsis (…) button to the right of the point in time field below the database name and you will see a date and time option, as shown in Figure 1.  Select the remaining restore options as you normally would.  Not sure about the rest of the options?  See the MSDN directions detailing point in time recovery.  Enjoy!

Figure 1 – Point In Time Restore