Some background... we have a test environment where we are testing TDE. We log ship databases from one server (let's call it Primary) to another server (Secondary) for reporting purposes.
Recently we had a power outage which caused, among other things, for log shipping to fail on many of these databases. When attempting to recreate log shipping, I was encountering an error while attempting to do the initial backup (https://qa.sqlservercentral.com/forums/topic/error-when-attempting-to-do-initial-backup-for-log-shipping)
Found a workaround for that which was to unencrypt the databases on Primary; once I did that log shipping worked fine.
In our second test environment - exact duplicate of production just like the one above - we had the same issues. Unencrpypted the databases and began the process of setting up log shipping, and the first few worked... however the next few threw the following error on the initial restore on Secondary:
Cannot find server certificate with thumbprint '>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>removed<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<'.
RESTORE FILELIST is terminating abnormally. (.Net SqlClient Data Provider)
I've verified that the database is not encrpyted, so I am trying to figure out why it would need the certificate to restore. I also re-did log shipping on one of the databases that had worked, just to make sure it still worked - it did. So the problem appears to be specific to certain databases (which seems to rule out a problem with the certificate itself?)
It's quite possible that this is due to some underlying corruption at the OS level. When we lost power, the storage went down but the VMs stayed up, and the result was a real mess. At the end of the day the answer may end up being scrap the environment and build a new clone, but I am interested in solving as a learning experience.