We are forced to perform some essential maintenance on one of our production environments. Instructions from the vendor state the recovery model of the database should be set to SIMPLE before the work is undertaken.
I'm OK with that and the business has approved the change, but I'm wrestling with the best way forward in terms of disaster recovery planning.
I want to ensure that the database can be restored up to the point of changing the recovery model, if needs be.
We take a full database backup at midnight every night, and log backups every hour between 4am and 9pm (operational hours).
This work will commence at 9am, just after a scheduled log backup, but of course I'm prepared for slippage into that hour based on various factors. I want to ensure we have a log backup in place to cover, lets say, 9.00am to 9.20am.
EDIT: Users are being locked out of the system at 9.00am or thereabouts, however I can't rely on the last log backup alone, as there may be transactions slipping past 9.00am that need to be restored. It depends when Management push the button...
What's the best course of action?
Should I just take an ad-hoc Transaction Log backup which I can, if needs be, apply after the latest Full Backup and sequence of Log Backups?
Or should I be looking at taking a Tail Log Backup, despite the fact I may never use it?