Thank you for your reply Naga. Yes, it is a lot of information. I tried to be real methodical but it just made for a very long post! The reason for my test was in preparation for a big database move that was not possible over the network. Turns out we had the option of backing up to a 1TB USB device and had that shipped to our other data center out of state. I was then able to restore the database and establish log shipping to it and all is good now.