Object Level Recovery

Object level recovery is a method to read database backup files and selectively restore individual database objects. OLR allows you to restore a specific table or other object from a database in a backup set. Furthermore, with OLR, it’s possible to restore the table to the original database you backed up or to an entirely different database.

Accidents happen. But when a table or other database objects get accidentally deleted, you can save a lot of time and effort by using object level recovery instead of having to apply a full backup. A number of software companies, including Red Gate and Idera, produce thoughtfully designed third-party OLR software to assist database admins with tricky data recovery jobs.

Some versions of Idera’s SQL Safe database backup software offer object level recovery. If you choose to enable object-level recovery, the SQL Safe Agent will read the data being transferred during the backup and build a data map that identifies the location of every table in the data written to the target back up file. The data map is also written to the backup file so that if it is necessary to undertake an object-level recovery , the SQL Safe Agent can just read the map and easily find the data to be restored as the target table.

SQL Safe has offered object level recovery to customers since the 4.0 and 5.0 releases of the product, but OLR has been replaced by the Instant Restore feature in all SQL Safe versions above 5.0.