Help undoing an accidental restore on SQL Server 2014

Yesterday I made a serious mistake¹: Restoring the wrong database.

Background (you may skip this section):

I right-clicked the Test database and proceeded to the "Restore Database" section as usual. Then, when selecting the media (file) for the Source, I browsed for my latest production database backup (performed at 01:00 AM). This was not a mistake; I did need to have up-to-date information on the Test database in order to... test.

However, as soon as I hit OK on the "Add media" dialog, SSMS detected that my backup was made from the Production DB and "silently" changed the "Destination" field to reflect that. I didn't realize this until it was too late. All database changes from 01AM to 06:30PM were lost.

After a few hours struggling on how I could approach my manager and deliver these unhappy news, I decided I would try my best to repair the damage in any way possible, and for a certain extent, I luckily succeed.

Now, the steps taken:

• First and foremost, I made sure that today's backup had been performed, since it contained DB entries between 06:30PM to 10:00PM which could not be lost.

• Went to the "Restore" dialog for the Production DB, and then clicked the Timeline option hoping to perform a point-in-time restore at precisely 06:29PM.

• Unzipped the previous day backup (same one I accidentally restored previously) to my default backup location, and made sure a suitable "log backup" was present on my system.

• Set up the desired point in time, clicked "Verify Backup Media" and proceeded to backup.

Now, I'm relieved that it worked, but as expected, all of my tables contains records up to 6:29PM and everything else is missing. It's a large database with more than 100 tables, and hand-checking and inserting everything would take days.

Question: is it possible to "restore" only the missing records which are present on my latest backup, but not in my current state DB? If so, what are the steps necessary?

¹ "Not as serious as yours, I fear"

First off... I think it is best to come clean to your manager on such issues. The business will notice the missing data and he will not appreciate being blindsided and not having all the facts at hand. In that event, things will be even worse for you. If you have no formal background in DBAing, you have no business doing DBA tasks and/or the real production DBAs ( if they even exist ) should have ensured that the business is protected against such human errors.

Simply put there is no way to restore individual rows auto-magically. There are tool set available ( Red Gate Data Compare springs to mind ) that allow you to compare data sets and build scripts of the differences, but it is upto you to decide which changes are good.

StackExchange Database Administrators Q#135887, answer score: 5