Recovery is the process of restoring your database file, transaction log, and dbspaces, and bringing the database file as up-to-date as possible with incremental transaction log files.

It is important that you validate your backup as part of your backup and recovery plan. You should only recover from a valid backup copy of the database.

The steps you need to take in the recovery process depend on whether you leave the transaction log untouched on incremental backup in your backup process. If your backup operation deletes or renames the transaction log, you may have to apply changes from several transaction logs. If your backup operation leaves the transaction log untouched, you need to use only the online transaction log in recovery.

If you have multiple transaction logs, transactions may span several transaction logs. You must apply the transaction logs in the correct order when recovering; otherwise, transactions that span multiple transaction logs are rolled back. You can specify the -ad database server option if you want the database server to determine the correct order in which to apply the transaction logs. See Recovering a database with multiple transaction logs.