The after-imaging feature lets you recover a database that was damaged when a failure caused the loss of the database or primary recovery (before image) area. When you enable after-imaging, the database engine writes notes containing a description of all database changes to the after-image (AI) files. You can use the AI files with the roll-forward recovery process to restore the database to the condition it was in before you lost the database, without losing completed transactions that occurred since the last backup.