backup set id not same in backupset and restorehistory

It is your responsibility to make sure you used the correct backup to do a restore.  

[When you do a restore, SQL doesn't attempt to identify in the system tables which backup is being restored based on the original backupset id (as you've discovered).]

You can include a description in your backups, and generate a unique description for every backup.  That would give you another way to verify that you're getting the backup you want.

OK- thanks for confirming..

but i do not see any description field in restorehistory?

You can add a description to the *backups*.  You can then check that description before deciding which backup to restore.

Keep in mind, you can restore a backup that was not made on that server or that was deleted from the msdb history long ago.  So SQL really can't match up the restore with a specific backup in some cases.

[I guess they could add a uniqueidentifier value to a backup and match on that during restore, but they chose not to.]

actually the tape backup team has to do the restore.. since we don't do it, there is no way to easily confirm that they did the right job.. that is the reason i was exploring this..

Hmm.  You could create a dummy table with a datetime that is autoupdated every (n[n]) hour(s), but has no other updates.  Then, upon restore, you could look in the row(s) in that table to determine what time range the backup that was restored was made in.

helped.. thanks Scott.