Nakul Vachhrajani (1/7/2011)
Hello!To me, the strategy that I have followed is:
1. Get the database online as soon as possible - non-current data allowed
2. Attempt to restore the most-recent data first - mostly OLTP systems need transactions from within the last month 80% of the time
3. Attempt to restore the history data - the rest of the 80% data, used 20% of the time
Going side-track here, but I find the above strategy useful in data cleanup projects as well.
Have a great day!
I agree with Nakul here. In most cases I'll go out on a limb and say uptime is more important than retrieving your existing data. I say that because downtime is putting future revenue at risk (assuming your system is revenue generating). At least if the system is up, even in a hobbled state and empty, future transactions can process.
Also, data loss is defined by your backup strategy. If you take tlog backups every 30 mins then that's your potential data loss, up to 30mins worth of data. Everything else is just offline until it can be restored assuming you have good backups. There's a big difference between the two. I consider data lost if it's truly lost, meaning there's no way to recover it. Everything else is just temporarily offline.