I am looking into taking some of our live production databases from our
datacenters and bringing them local, so I can use them as a dev db.

Now all the tools tht I have seen whether it be log shipping or
replication, restore the dbs in stand by mode. Which is more for a
disaster recovery model.

I am not looking to do DR, I want the dbs to be accessible to our
developers to make changes. And I think that's where the problem comes
in. If you use log shipping then once the db gets changed, it will be
out of sync with the prod db, and therefore a new production db will
need to be restored prior to restoring another log.



I am not looking for up to the minute data for our developers, I would
be able to probably take semi daily, one in the afternoon and one at
night



Does anyone know of any third party tools that would allow me to get
this done, or know of a way I could somehow use replication or log
shipping? Or any other native sql method?




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