request for guidance on best practices

awilliamson

I have configured log shipping from a remote sql server to one here at my facility...basically for disaster recovery.

My question is if whether or not I should continue to perform nightly full database backups on this remote server?

Will the full backups interfere with the log shipping process? My fear is that I would lose some transactions and bring the two databases out of sync.

Any and all input is appreciated.

Chris Auckland

Thanks for your post.

There is no problem if you want to take ad-hoc full backups for a database you are using for log shipping. This is because taking a full backup does not truncate the transaction log, and therefore does not affect what is contained in the transaction log backups.

The only thing to watch out for is that you do not take this full backup at the same time that a t-log backup is scheduled. If the tasks clash they will cause one of the jobs to fail. You must make sure that the full backup occurs after the t-log backup has completed, and the full backup must have completed before next t-log backup runs.

I hope this answers your question.

awilliamson

Thanks Chris...exactly what I needed to know

petey

If you are using SQL Server 2005, it is possible to perform a transaction log backup while a full or file backup is running. However, a transaction log backup will still block other types of backups.