Restoring Transaction Logs

I have a customer that needs to restore a database to
midnite on 12/31. They have a full database backup at
3pm, 2 transaction log without truncate backups and a
transaction log with truncate at midnite. I would assume
that you would run a restore on the full database backup
and then run a restore on the midnite trans log with
truncate with recover database selected. Would it be
necessary to include any of the transaction logs without
tuncate in the restore?
What is confusing to me is the transaction log backups
keep decreasing in size. I would think that if you don't
truncate, the sizes of the transaction log backups would
keep increasing until you truncated. Any help would be
appriciated.
ZackIn principle you will need to restore the most recent full db backup, =then ALL log backups since the full backup. The cause of your confusion =is (I guess) that backing up a log makes the space available for re-use, =The final log backup (that you describe as "transaction log with =truncate at midnite" is I expect not really a log backup at all, can you =confirm if this was taken via the SQL statement BACKUP LOG ... WITH =TRUNCATE ONLY, if so it has truncated the log not backed it up. In which =case the best you can get is to restore the full backup (WITH =NORECOVERY), the first log (WITH NORECOVERY) and the second log (WITH =RECOVERY).
If youre midnight log backup is a 'TRUNCATE ONLY" you are expposed from =a recovery point of view until 3pm the following day, since once the log =has been truncated it cannot be used to rollforward transactions until =the next full backup has been taken.
Hope that helps
Mike John
"Zack Godwin" <zgodwin@.freightsystemsinc.com> wrote in message =news:052b01c3d46b$0a7254c0$a001280a@.phx.gbl...
> I have a customer that needs to restore a database to > midnite on 12/31. They have a full database backup at > 3pm, 2 transaction log without truncate backups and a > transaction log with truncate at midnite. I would assume > that you would run a restore on the full database backup > and then run a restore on the midnite trans log with > truncate with recover database selected. Would it be > necessary to include any of the transaction logs without > tuncate in the restore? > > What is confusing to me is the transaction log backups > keep decreasing in size. I would think that if you don't > truncate, the sizes of the transaction log backups would > keep increasing until you truncated. Any help would be > appriciated.
> > Zack