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Native Restore From Litespeed Backup

More than once I have had the need to recover the native backup file from within the compressed Litespeed backup file. Fortunately Quest provides an extractor utility in order to help with the process. Otherwise, you would be forced to do a restore followed by a native backup. If your database is of a considerable size then the time needed to accomplish that task could be prohibitive; it will always be simpler to do the extraction as opposed to a restore and a backup.

Extraction is very straightforward. First step is to open a command window and navigate to the directory where the utility is located, this is typically the C:\Program Files\Quest Software\LiteSpeed\SQL Server directory.

Next, issue the following command to extract the native backup files.  Yes, files. In fact you will have one file created for each thread that was used when Litespeed was taking the initial database backup. The command is roughly as follows:

extractor.exe -F [path to backup file taken by litepseed] -E [name of file you want to be created]

So, if you had a backup of AdventureWorks saved to C:\AdWks.bak, and you wanted to extract the native dump from that file and create new files in the same directory, you would run the following command:

extractor.exe -F c:\AdWks.bak -E c:\AdWks_ext.bak

This command results in the creation of multiple files. You can configure a path and filename here if you want to have the files stored somewhere other than the current directory.

OK, so what do you do with these files? Well, you restore them, of course, using either T-SQL or SSMS. One common reason for needing to have a native backup is for those rare times when you need to provide a vendor with a copy and that same vendor does not have a copy of Litespeed. And while the extraction utility makes it easy to provide the necessary files, you have no idea who is on the receiving end of the multiple files. I have lost count of the number of vendors I have sent the extracted files to and received an email back that either says “we don’t know what to do with these files” or “can you send us just one file instead?”

Sure, I can do that as well. Or, I could take a minute to teach you how to do it for yourself. Here goes:

Open up SSMS and all you need to do is point to the files. Just add in each file as shown below, and click OK. Then, select your restore point and click OK again. You should be fine, the database restore should be underway at this point. 

Now, if you prefer T-SQL, the equivalent syntax would be:

RESTORE DATABASE [AdventureWorks]
FROM  DISK = N’C:\AdWks_ext.bak2′,
DISK = N’C:\AdWks_ext.bak1′,
DISK = N’C:\AdWks_ext.bak0′
GO

It’s that simple.

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