When you read this, you just might cry...
We wrote a SharePoint intranet app for the one of our clients that keeps track of files and manages them through various levels of approval. Several files containing important data were accidentally deleted between December 11 – 15. They noticed the files were missing and called us. They have a local company that is responsible for managing their servers so we contacted them and asked for the most recent backup. There was a deafening silence in the room when they told us that they had meticulously configured the nightly backups exactly according to the disaster recovery plan but only now realized that they'd never actually started the process! Wow...
I'm trying to recover the data if possible. The last backup was done manually at the end of October prior to installing an extra feature that the client had requested. We've rolled back to then and recovered some of the data, but everything done since October is still missing.
When SQL was configured, database recovery mode was set to FULL. I've got a 4GB .MDF file and a log file (.LDF) that is about 20GB. I do not have a .TRN backup. When I try to restore to Dec 10, it rolls all the way back to the October backup. The server is Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard running MOSS 2007 and SQL 2008. As I said above, I'm a little out of my element here. I've asked around and most people I've spoken with think that it is possible to recover the missing data from the log file but nobody I've talked to actually knows how. Help me ServerFault, you're my only hope!
Is it possible to do a point-in-time restore with only the log file? If yes, how?