Sean Gallardy looks at the intersection of two SQL Server capabilities:
I was recently asked about T-SQL Snapshot backups on secondary replicas, which I hadn’t looked at for many years as it’s kind of a niche item. I was definitely surprised to find little caveats here and there, thus you get this wonderful post.
If you’re unfamiliar with T-SQL Snapshot backups, it’s a way to flush and hold changes made by IO to a database (your Freeze and Thaw entries in the errorlog) so that a stable disk image can be created and then backed up at the storage or filesystem layer. This can be an extremely fast way to create snapshots of databases that are quite large (assuming you’ve set everything up correctly) even across storage arrays (assuming it supports other options, such as ODX).
Read on to see what you have to do to get both to play nice together.