Log shipping is great.
It's basically the act of beginning a restore with no recovery, and then restoring logs (with no recovery) indefinitely up until the moment your DR needs require you to need a warm standby.
What's even better than log shipping?
Red Gate log shipping.
Red Gate SQLBackup of course gives you compressed backups, so when you do log shipping with Red Gate you get all the great benefits of having a warm standby, except you do it faster and with less less disk consumption.
Peter Yeoh has published, in my opinion, the authoritative discussion of using Red Gate for log shipping, so it seems only right to point you there.
Peter also has a separate discussion of a free tool that Red Gate makes available for copying files from one host to another = the copytool. I use it for Red Gate log shipping (and I have also used it for other things, it's great.).
I have found it convenient to use the Windows task scheduler to run the Red Gate copytool and prefer this over using the SQLAgent. I do use SQLAgent to back up and restore my logs.
N.B. - as I mentioned on Friday, I use Ola's SQL maint scripts and his DatabaseBackup proc has syntax that allows you to simply tell it to use Red Gate to perform your backups. Ola's process and the convenient (default) way it organizes backups into folders makes my Red Gate log shipping config easy to manage.
If you don't already use log shipping or Red Gate, try this out. You can download a free trial of SQLBackup here.
Let me know what you think or if you achieve your DR goals a little differently.
