Backup Considerations for a Subscription Server

Subscribers are the least affected of the servers that participate in a data replication system. Replication is essentially transparent to a subscription server. The subscriber receives replicated data as if it were sent by a SQL Server client.

Replication information concerning the last received transaction is maintained with the job_id column of the MSlast_job_info table, which is resident within each destination database. There is no specific replication information preserved within the transaction log of a subscription server.

The important issue when considering the backup of a subscription server is that the subscribed database must be able to be recovered to a known point in time. This can be accomplished through the use of:

In both these cases the backup events occur on a scheduled basis, and the administrator can count on a preserving an image of each subscription server's database within a specific period of time. This is an important issue when determining the replication cleanup schedule of the associated distribution server(s).