I pinged Steve with this. He will likely respond to you.

I should have updated that article. I looked through it after I posted, and realized that I had some VBScript scripts there looked at sizes of actual backup files.

These provided...

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/20010422115754/85/

I used to monitor backup size quite a bit. It told me if data was growing a lot, and that's all I care about. Knowing if things are changing and...

I haven't heard much about this, though I'd think that IO would be as much, or more of an issue. Depending on the cube building, I think a lot of...

I agree with Barry. I can't see replication as less work at all.

I think it happens regularly, but hopefully not too often.

It's often in the eye of the beholder. People say/do things that they don't perceive as a big deal, but...

Good point. Edited the question.

That is really strange. AFAIK, the SQL backup process just throws pages out as quick as possible. No reason inside SQL to have it run slower.

I would lean towards the...

First, is the hardware the same? Including disks (type/number). That can have a huge effect.

The Service Packs address bugs, and it's possible you've coded around a bug. I haven't heard...

That's a good article from Greg. Be sure you consider the security aspects of setting this up as described by the article.

Thanks for the update. Glad you found it.

I wouldn't just run this without being absolutely positive of what I was doing. You should really call MS support for this.

I agree with Justin's advice. Just like mirroring, log shipping is by the database.

None of these technologies handles system databases. You have to handle those manually, probably periodic transfers of...

The backup contains

- data

- log records that occurred during the backup process.

It doesn't contain the full log, but it does contain data about the size of the log. That file...

Everything is always logged. Simple mode just allows the space to be reused when the transaction is committed.

There might be more data in the package, or some other change that's...