Introduction
Log shipping is one of the oldest disaster recovery solutions available in SQL Server. Log shipping automatically ships the transaction log backups of the specified database from a primary instance to one or more secondary instances. The secondary instances restore the transaction log backups individually, thereby maintaining a copy of the primary database.
In this lesson, we'll learn to configure, manage, and monitor log shipping.
A typical log shipping configuration consists of a primary SQL Server instance and one or more secondary SQL Server instance. The following diagram shows a log shipping configuration with a primary SQL Server instance, P, and two secondary SQL Server instances: S1 and S2:
Figure 6.1: A log shipping configuration
The steps performed to log ship the HR database shown in the diagram are as follows:
A SQL Server agent backup job at the primary instance P performs a transaction log backup of the HR database and copies it to the backup share location.
The backup...
