Hello,
We've done this before and I've read others have done it too; but now we are trying to find out if there's any risk at all and whether or not it is fully supported by MS or not?
We have a database that is replicated and detaching it is really not a simple method as we are obliged to drop the replication first. That causes a lot of hours of work when re-attaching the db back and rebuilding the whole replication. Therefore we would like to confirm if it's safe or not to simply do a copy of the .mdf/.ldf files?
Also, is there any problem if we were to restore a replicated db from a backup as another db on the same clustered SQL Server instance?
The questions we would have are the following:
1- The reason is we want to measure the time it takes to restore on the SAN. Would the restore time be equal to the backup time? Currently the backup of 200GB takes 30 minutes, would the restore be close to 30 minutes or it would take 2, 3 times or more?
2- And most importantly would there be a problem if we restored this replicated db as another db, would we get in any type of replication trouble? I've never done it before so I don't know what to expect by having to restore a replicated db on the same SQL Server where the distribution db is located.
I would appreciate any information.
Thank you