You do know how to backup and restore your software don't you?

Based on a not-very-representative sample of the software we use I have concluded that people like to build stuff on the Microsoft platform. So that means SQLServer and IIS (and .net, though that's not relevant here). I have also concluded that for understandable reasons the companies that sell you stuff on those platforms don't support the Microsoft bits. This is because they could get sucked into all sorts of issues that aren't related to their software, but are very much to do with, say, tuning your IIS setup.

So whilst they make sure that it's all up and running when they first install you might find that you need to at least know a bit about SQLServer and IIS. So here's a checklist:

• Do you know how to backup your database?
• Is there more than one database?
• Have you tried restoring the database onto another machine? This is crucial, because a good backup is no use if you can't restore it.
• Do you know how to back up your IIS settings? iisback is the key to this
• Do you know how the application software interacts with IIS?
• Again, have you tried restoring your IIS setup on another machine? Web deploy for IIS 6 and 7 looks like a good (if not straightforward) way of having a standby server.