This entry is part 1 of a 7 part series. To jump to a particular entry, you can click any of the following links:

• Log Shipping – What it is
• Planning – Laying it all out before setting it up
• Preparing your Servers
• Creating a maintenance plan
• When bad things happen to good servers – issues I’ve run into and how I fixed them
• Hands free monitoring
• Flipping the switch – How to do your manual failover

Log shipping has approximately 1.2 billion settings (or so it seems). After combing through the settings, I was able to come up with a list of questions tht answer all of the key settings options. Having these answers in front of me during the creation of the plan really helped speed up the process.

1. What is the name of your Source Database?
   
   
2. How many Destination Databases are there, and what are their names?
   
   
3. What is the name of your Monitor Server?
   • This should be a separate server. If you don’t have an extra server, you can put the monitor on the destination server. However, if the instance of SQL Server stops on the destination server then you won’t get notified (because the monitor is now down, too).
   
   
4. How often will the Source Database generate logs?
   • I use 5 minutes for high-activity databases, 15 to 30 for medium-activity, and 12 hours for a very low activity database
   
   
5. How often will the Destination Database apply the logs from the Source Database?
   • I use the same value as question 4
   
   
6. Where will the Source log files reside?
   • When the log files are created, they will be copied to this directory.
   • This folder must be on the same server as your source database
   • Must be able to be shared and seen by all destination servers
   
   
7. How long will the log files reside on the server source?
   • SQL Server agent will automatically delete the files that fall outside of this time range
   • I use one week as a general rule
   
   
8. What will the start and end times be for log shipping
   • Log shopping will only happen between these times
   • Use 12:00 AM and 11:59 PM for 24 hour log shipping
   
   For each Destination Database, answer the following:
9. Where will the log files reside after being copied from the Source Database?
   • This folder must be on the destination server
   
   
10. What is the Copy frequency for moving the logs from the Source Database to this Destination Database?
    • I use the same values as from questions 4 and 5
    
    
11. How often should the Destination Database check for new log files?
    • I use the same values as from questions 4 and 5
    
    
12. What is the maximum amount of time allowed between the last backup on the Source DB and the last load on the Destination DB?
    • anything over this will be considered ‘out of sync’
    
    
13. What is the maximum amount of time allowed with no copies being performed?
    • anything over this will be considered ‘out of sync’
    
    
14. How old (in minutes) should a transaction log be before it is loaded into the Destination DB?
    • I use zero for this setting. No reason to wait before they can be loaded
    
    
15. How long will transaction logs be kept on the destination server?
    • SQL Server agent will automatically delete the files that fall outside of this time range
    • I use one week as a general rule
    
    
16. How long will transaction log history information be kept?
    • SQL Server agent will automatically delete the files that fall outside of this time range
    • I use 2 days as a general rule
    
    

In the next section, I’ll show you what you need to do on your servers to support your logshipping processes.