I think you're confused a little on log shipping.

The way log shipping works on the primary

- Make a full backup

- Make log backups

- Make periodic full backups

It just runs.

On the secondary:

- Restore full backup with NORECOVERY

- copy logs from the primary every xx time (hours, minutes, days)

- restore logs with NORECOVERY after yyy delay.

At any point in time, the secondary ought to be fairly close to the primary in terms of data updates. Some people restore logs right away, maybe copying them every 5 minutes. In this case, the secondary typically has one log to restore in the event the primary fails.

Some people delay the log restores by an hour, to catch any issues on the primary (like a delete without a WHERE). In this case, you'd need to restore all the log backups you make in that hour to catch up.

There is not automatic switchover for clients, unlike for mirroring. So you need to "redirect" all clients to the secondary server. If you use the IP or Windows host name, then each client has to change that. If you use DNS, you can change the host entry, but you might need to flush the entries on clients. You could rename the secondary to the primary as well.

No matter what, you might have network ARP issues as well, or other items that you have to flush from the caches.