Question about differential restores (SQL Server 2005)

[cryogeneric]

Hello everybody,

I'm not all that familiar with backing up and restoring databases on SQL 2005 and I have a question. First, let me give you a little insight into how we're setup and what we want to do.

We have two servers--live & test. Currently, we perform a full back of the live server each night and restore it to the test server. This all runs automatically. It's been requested that it would be nice to have the test server receive differential restores during the day to keep it updated with the live server. So my question is this:

Since we're doing FULL backups and restores, can we do differential backups on the live server and restore to them test periodically during the day? Can we restore differentials on DB that been restored with a FULL backup?

Thanks for your help! :)

[nbiswas]

Check these out:

a) SQL Server 2005 Backups

b) Differential Database Backups for SQL Server

hope this helps