Best Practices for Log Shipping

We have a 35Gb db that grows about 25% per year. Luckily, we just put it on
new iron that has speeded it up greatly. We have only ever backed this up
once daily at night when no users were on, with "simple" recovery mode. Good
fortune that we have not had a failure in six years. Bad luck would have had
us lose a full day's work if catastrophe struck. Must be divine protection.
Now that we have the new iron, we're looking at using the old server as a
log-shipping secondary server. Assume both new and old server are adequate
hardware to support the load; new server = win2008svr, sql2008std; old server
= win2003ent_sp2, sql2008std.
I have used some articles to "learn" how to do this. Oh yeah, transactional
replication is not an option due to absence of primary keys on many tables.
So, assuming I am able to make my way through the online samples to do this
setup (which I have done and appears to be working since I can see changes
occurring in the read-only secondary database), I now have several questions:
1. Now that the primary server database is set as "full recovery" mode, and
the tran logs are being shipped successfully to the secondary server, can I
still make full backups of the primary database without screwing up the
transaction log truncation? In other words, does the act of doing a separate
backup mess up the transaction log backups running as part of the log
shipping jobs? If I can't make backups of the primary database, should I
just backup the secondary database late at night to get the "once-a-day"
backup?
2. What are the basic steps for manually failing over to the secondary
server if/when the primary server croaks? Of course, redirecting the client
apps is necessary, but I'm confused with the changes I have to make on the
secondary server in SQL, particularly with changing it from standby to
active, etc.
3. Once the primary server has failed, the secondary server has become the
production active server, and then the primary server is fixed, what must I
do to go back to the original primary server? I assume I wait until there is
no activity and restore a backup taken from the secondary (active) server and
restor it onto the primary server, redirect the clients, etc...but is there
anything I need to do within the log shipping setup/jobs?
4. Can you direct me to documents that explain the big picture particularly
well, and don't just contain step-by-step examples on basic setup? I'm not a
DBA but have been "the dba" by default in many small environments, so I have
somewhat of a clue, but don't live the details day-by-day.
Thanks in advance!
Larry

For the first part, the safest option is to do a copy-only backup:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms191495.aspx
Controlled failovers and failbacks are explained here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645954.aspx
For more general info, I'd use BOL or Ron Talmage's original article:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2000/maintain/logship1.mspx
It is a setup article but each step is explained with background info so you
should gain a good understanding this way.
HTH,
Paul Ibison (www.replicationanswers.com)