Gamleur84 - Wednesday, December 6, 2017 12:32 PM
In essence yes that is correct, regular log backups should be made to ensure you can meet your companies RTO and RPO as well as keep sizes manageable.
If you have a 500GB log and its full back up the log first, then do a full backup.
If you have restored this to a new server the restore command has to create the database structure as is in the full backup, so it will still have to create a 500GB log file even thought if 490GB is empty it still creates the file at 500GB not 10GB. Again another reason to do regular log backups to stop the file size getting to much out of control.
That being said, you may want to profile the wait stats when restoring, your probably getting a lot of IO waits, I would be inclined to see if you have "Instant File Initialization" enabled and try the restore again with a completely new database see if that helps with reducing the 12 hour restore time.