Question About Redgate Backup and Logshipping

pokhrea

Hi,

I am trying to use the logshipping feature within Redgate 4.5. Normally I do a full backup,hourly differential backup and 10 min logbackup to a backup server.
I want to keep this and also implement a log shipping to a standy database with hourly update of logs.
I am not sure I can do both of these at the same time incase of the failure should I be using my normal backup files or the log shipped and what are the consequences in doing this?
Thanks

Brian Donahue

Hello,

No problem -- log shipping is not going to affect your normal backups. Log shipping is a superset of your current log backup strategy, in other words, you perform your log backups as normal, then you use the COPYTO command (SQL Backup) to copy the log backup to the other server once it has completed successfully. The log shipping will set up a second job on the receiving server to restore the transaction log backups.

petey

Note that you should avoid backing up the transaction logs using both SQL Server and SQL Backup. During a restore, the transaction logs need to be restored in sequence, and it will be troublesome to restore half the logs using SQL Server, and the other half using SQL Backup.

pokhrea

Peter's subject is covered as redgate is being used to do the normal backup. How ever further doubts as to what Brian has suggested
I have 12AM full, 1 Hour Diff and 10 min log all round the clock. Now I am thinking of using logshipping wizard within Redgate for half hourly log structure to ship logs to a standby server starting from 12.30Am daily round the clock. If i set this up then there will be 2 jobs for tran log happening every 10 min and every half an hour both through Redgate so wondering if this is the way to implement this and checking to see if there will be any impact on the overall backup/restore sequence

Thanks

petey

Transaction log backups need to be restored in sequence. You cannot 'pick and choose' logs to restore. E.g.

- 12:00 - full backup
- 12:10 - log backup A - existing job
- 12:20 - log backup B - existing job
- 12:30 - log backup C - existing job (#1)
- 12:32 - log backup D - log shipping job (#1)
- 12:40 - log backup E - existing job

#1 - two backups for the same database cannot run concurrently.

Say you now need to restore the database up to 12:40. You need to restore the full backup, followed by ALL the transaction log backups. You cannot ignore log backup D. In the log shipping scenario, you cannot just restore log backup D, and ignore A to C.

What you can do is to change the SQL Backup script for your existing job, so that it uses the COPYTO option to copy the transaction log backups to the same location as that used by the log shipping job. So when the restore runs on the standby server, it will also pick up these other logs.