Log shipping is a tried and true method in SQL Server for keeping a copy of your data on a secondary server. If you haven’t worked with this feature yet, join Jes to learn the basics, such as what log shipping is used for, what the moving pieces are, and how to set it up in this 30-minute video:
Want to learn more about monitoring and failing over? Watch Part 2: When Disaster Strikes!
sdpages February 27, 2013 | 1:16 pm
One of the discussion/question at the end was, Is it possible to run a separate Transactional Log backup along with the LS_backup job that the Log Shipping setup with create ? I’ve had problems before on the restore job when setting up parallel transactional log backup jobs like these. How to you setup this new log shipping backup job if you already have a Transactional log backup from your daily Maintenance Plan ?
Please suggest…
Brent Ozar February 27, 2013 | 1:27 pm
SDPages – check out copy-only backups: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms191495.aspx
One of the jobs will need to be copy-only.
sdpages February 28, 2013 | 11:52 am
Cool ! Thanks.
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Sri E March 26, 2013 | 3:25 pm
Great webcast. Thanks.
I have a question; In my existing enviroment we have SP dbs in db Mirroring setup. Now to move to our new COLO we are planning to setup Log Shipping above the exsiting Mirroring setup. All the dbs are in Full recvoery mode and now to create the new LS scenario I have to take a full backup and log backup to start the LS. How will it impact my recovery capablity, as this might break my log chain?
Is this a possibility at all?
Thanks for you time.
Sri E
Jes Schultz Borland March 27, 2013 | 6:52 am
To set up log shipping, you can specify a new full backup, or an existing full backup. However, log shipping will need to replace your current transaction log backup job. You can have two jobs take log backups, but if only one of those sets of backups is restored to the secondary, the log shipping chain will be incomplete. It’s best to have log shipping be your only log backup for the time being.
Vitor Pombeiro April 22, 2013 | 5:59 pm
Hi Jes,
I like to think about the log shipping as being more on the high availability side than on the disaster recovery side.
What do you think?
P.S.: I enjoy watching your video, congratulations.
Brent Ozar April 22, 2013 | 7:00 pm
Vitor – if you use log shipping for high availability, how do you manage failover when the primary box dies? And how do you fail back?
Vitor Pombeiro April 23, 2013 | 5:46 am
I like to think of log shipping as the “modest” high availability and the always on as the “rich” high availability. It all depends
on how much you want to spend and how much time you can be offline.
I’m not saying that is wrong to say that log shipping is a disaster recovery process.
I don’t like to think of log shipping as a disaster recovery process because it may lead to other people to think that the backups aren’t needed any more.
“Why do we need? We have the data on another server.”
And in my experience the disasters I had to deal with where issues related with someone, or a process, that mess up the data and if you don’t know what as happened as soon as it happens then the secondary server will have the same problem.
Jes Schultz Borland April 23, 2013 | 8:03 am
Vitor, one of the benefits of log shipping and the second copy of the data relates to your last point. There have been cases where someone has dropped a table or deleted an important record, and because the second copy of the data exists, it’s been retrieved. Yes, this does involve finding out about the issue before the affected log is restored, but it can happen.
Log shipping can be a high availability solution, but without the automation factor I wouldn’t use it as an HA solution for my important data. I focus on log shipping as a DR solution, because that is where it generally fits in most business models.