You can do a point in time restore if a) you have a full database backup and
b) you have an unbroken sequence of transaction log backups following it.
This might be clearer with an example - let's say your backup plan is to do
BACKUP DATABASE at 01h00, and BACKUP LOG every hour from 08h00 to 19h00.

By 10h30, you will have 4 backups for today - 1 full DB backup, and 3 log
backups (8h, 9h, 10h). Suppose you now discover that a user truncated an
important table at 08h30, so you decide to restore to 08h25. First you
restore the full backup from 01h00, then the 08h00 log backup, then the
09h00 log with STOPAT = '20030701 08:25'. This will restore all transactions
that were written to the log before 08h25.

So you can restore up to any point in time between the full backup and the
latest log backup. If it's 10h30 and you need to restore to 10h15, but the
latest log backup you have is 10h00, then you can do BACKUP LOG manually,
and follow the same steps as above - restore the full backup then the
sequence of logs, this time with STOPAT = '20030701 10:15'.

Of course, assuming that you keep your backups for some time, you can always
restore to some time yesterday if you want, by restoring yesterday's full
backup, then yesterday's logs.

Simon

"A.M. de Jong" <arnojo@wxs.nl> wrote in message
news:bdq8gi$k2c$1@reader08.wxs.nl...
> Somehow I had the idea that the current transaction log can be used with a
> point in time restore operation.
> But I now have the idea that point in time restore can only be used when a
> transaction log backup has taken place.
> And thus that a point of time restore is only possible up to This specific
> backup (e.g. the transaction log backup)
> Am I correct and isn't it that odd ???
>
> Arno de Jong, The Netherlands.
>
>