Considerations for structure-only or full-recovery baselines
In addition to determining when to establish recovery points for your application, you need to determine whether the recovery points are for data structures only or whether they will also include data.
During application development, losing data might be of little importance and a structure-only baseline can be sufficient. If you make changes to a production system, however, a full-recovery baseline gives you the ability to restore data as well.
For example, you can create a baseline that captures the structure definitions that are used by a specific version of an application. During testing, you might make modifications (such as repartitioning an index or using different storage groups) to those structure definitions for performance tuning. If the tuning attempts are unsuccessful, you can recover to the baseline and restore the previous index partitions and storage groups without having to track the changes and undo them manually. If only the structure has been restored, any data added between the creation of the baseline and its recovery is retained.
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