What is the difference between log shipping and incremental backup?

Log shipping and incremental backup are two different approaches to ensuring fault tolerance and backing up databases.

Log shipping is the process of automatically transferring and applying transaction logs from the primary database to a secondary (backup) database. This allows maintaining a nearly up-to-date backup of the database with minimal delay. In case of a failure, it is possible to quickly switch to the backup database.

Incremental backup involves creating backups only of the data that has changed since the last full or incremental backup. It saves space and time compared to a full backup, but restoring may require sequentially applying multiple incremental backups.

Key differences:

• Log shipping focuses on transferring and applying transaction logs to keep the primary and secondary servers synchronized.
• Incremental backup focuses on saving changed data as separate copies for later restoration.

Example: In SQL Server, log shipping automatically copies and restores transaction logs on the backup server, while incremental backup saves only changed data pages since the last backup.