Creating a backup is the easy part, of course. How lovely would it be if you could do the restore at your leisure-but that's never how it is, huh? Well, you can prepare for it by doing it at least once every few months for practice. To get a real sense of how it may look when you need to recover from a real crash, it would be best to perform the restore on a different server—perhaps you already have one in a test-environment, or on a Virtual machine.
The first important thing to keep in mind is that if your backup was created on a server with a certain update (or service pack, when those come out), the server should be brought to that same level of installation before attempting to restore. If this is impossible for some reason, you can force the server to accept a different-version backup by modifying the registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\WhaleCom\e-Gap\Configuration\
.
Create a DWORD (32-bit) value ImportFromOtherVersion
, and set its...