Databases can fail for a myriad of reasons. Power outages can cause a hardware failure. Server misconfiguration can lead to data corruption or a crashed system. You get the idea.

It’s for reasons like this that you back up your data. Assuming you stay on top of your backup plan, you should have enough data to bring your system back to a state at or near the time of failure. Sometimes, however, those recent backups have either failed or are no good for some other reason. What then?

Outlined below is a procedure that may bring your data back. It’s certainly not a sure-fire method, though. There are a lot of IF’s in this scenario, and a lot of reasons why it may not work. That said, it may be worth a try before resorting to attempting to recover data from a database in emergency mode.

Read the rest of this entry »