Hi all. I am still here. Just get a bit busy and disappear for a while. 🙂 🙂 So one of the cool things in Pathfinder is some updated backup and restore features. It is still based around the same log shipping story, but we have automated almost all of the steps and vastly improved our documentation to try and make this easier. We are still working on making it better with things like a UI and support for alternatives instead of just log shipping, but hopefully you will find the new docs easy to understand and the new procedure easier to do. I am in the process of trying to find a way to back port this to BTS 2004 but in the mean time, a lot of the work can be used as “samples” of how to automate the process for 2004. This includes a more finalized version of the scripts I have included below for the automated restoration. They are vbs files so slight modifications for 2004 can be done (I know the TDDS connection string is a slightly different format in 2004 so that will need to be changed). Also, it has some automation for restoring to the mark and you can use the way I import data to populate the LogShippingDatabases table as an example as this manual process can be error prone (I was on the phone with a customer today who had a typo while performing this step which caused failures). The underlying technology for our log shipping story is the same from 2004 to 2006, we have just tried to make it a lot easier. I highly recommend everyone check out the new docs on this feature and try it out on 2006 and then see how you can use it on 2004 while I work to officially backport it. Please send feedback as we continue to work to make this feature better for you. Hope you all have a happy holiday season.


 


Lee