Hi,

I have solved one part of my problem   There IS a timeout setting when executing remote stored procedures. On the Properties dialog of the source database server (the one from which the backups are being generated) look for the Connections tab and check the Query Time Out (sec. 0=unlimited) setting.

This setting is the timeout for queries executed on a remote connection (eg: linked servers). The default seems to be 600s (ten minutes), but on my production server, for reasons lost to history,  it was set to 60s!

If you are trying to restore a 200K transaction log, this is not a problem. But for a 200Mb log or 600Mb database, the query will time out if it takes more than 10 minutes (or 1 minute on my server). However, it does not seem to generate an error! The job history reports success, but the remote procedure step history does not include the text from the restore operation, and subsequent transaction logs fail because the restore never completed

Changing this query timeout setting to 900s gave the query enough time to execute the remote stored procedure and perform a 600Mb database restore. I will wait and see if the transaction logs continue to restore correctly.

Cheers for your help!

David