Moving db across the country- full copy, then differential?

My company needs to move a 30 Gig SQL Server across the country as soon
as possble on July 1. Turns out moving the full db across the network
takes a few hours.

I'd like to move a full copy of db a week ahead of time, and then just
move either a differential backup(s) or transaction log with with the
week's new data on July 1.

Can anyone suggest the best strategy for doing this? Currently we're
doing a differential backup each hour on the db, and dumping the txn
log each night.

Many thanks,

Burt

"Burt" <burt_5920@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1114622171.935523.58160@l41g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
> My company needs to move a 30 Gig SQL Server across the country as soon
> as possble on July 1. Turns out moving the full db across the network
> takes a few hours.
>
> I'd like to move a full copy of db a week ahead of time, and then just
> move either a differential backup(s) or transaction log with with the
> week's new data on July 1.
>
> Can anyone suggest the best strategy for doing this? Currently we're
> doing a differential backup each hour on the db, and dumping the txn
> log each night.
>
> Many thanks,
>
> Burt
>

Probably some form of log shipping would be the easiest solution - copy each
transaction log (or differential) backup to the target location as soon as
it's made. If your current transaction log backups are too large for that,
then you can simply backup more often to reduce the file size.

So you would physically send the full backup on tape or disk a few days
before, then start shipping the logs/diffs over the network. At the
destination, you recover the backup and then the logs as soon as you get
them, using WITH NORECOVERY until you have the last log backup on the 1st of
July. Check out RESTORE and "log shipping" in Books Online, or Google it to
get an idea of the general approach - it's a builtin feature of SQL 2000
Enterprise Edition, but there are a number of other sample implementations
out there.

Simon