Ray Mond (12/29/2010)
Agree with Grant re. the need to actually restore from a database backup to ensure it's recoverable.RESTORE VERIFYONLY is fairly useless (with regards to data integrity in the backup set) without the use of the CHECKSUM option during a backup, and even with that option used, corruption of the MTF header and/or tail of the backup set can result in RESTORE VERIFYONLY succeeding but the actual restore to fail.
Just so I can learn better, do you have any white papers or deeper documentation into precisely that issue available? I've got a little best-practice article I want to write up and having a good reference would really help.
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