Have you ever tested recovering from a standby database backed up in this manner? I'm working on a very similar backup strategy. The one thing I'm doing differently is that instead of stopping the SQL Server services and copying the raw database files all at once, I've written a tsql script that runs through the secondary databases one by one and...

1) disables the recovery job

2) offlines the db

3) xcopy the db's files to the backup directory

4) onlines the db

5) enables the recovery job

This works. So far so good.

I have 100+ standby databases on my secondary server and by doing it this way I can continue to allow the logs to be copied and applied on other secondary databases while I'm backing up the one.

Here's my question though and it pertains to how to use these backups to restore the primary database.

Full recovery - this is a piece of cake. I end recovery on the standby (recover database ... with recovery), take a backup, and restore the backup on the primary.

Point in time recovery - Is this possible and if so how?

Lets say I need to restore to a point in time prior to when the last log was applied. I can restore an older copy of the mdf and ldf files, as well as the necessary log backups up to the point where I want to recover. How do I attach the mdf/ldf files (presumably under a different DB name) to begin rolling forward the logs? If you try to do this you get the "You cant attach a database that was being recovered" error and the attach operation fails.