Recovery can mean several things:
Online recovery is the process by which the database is brought into a consistent state after the server is restarted.
Recovery from backups means restoring a corrupt database by loading a database dump, then applying transaction log dumps to the database to bring it back to a consistent state.
Finally, although Adaptive Server does not offer this functionality, recovery can also refer to recovering specific objects from a dump or other offline storage and restoring only that object rather than the database as a whole. While this technique is outside the scope of the current discussion, it may be useful in some of the recovery processes outlined below.