Hi Douglas,

Thanks for the reply. I agree with you in some cases but how many servers are you managing?  In a single server environment I think your points are well taken and these steps are a waste of time.  In a production environment you would be backing up the MSDB and should have a copy of all this information.  I mentioned this in the first article.

In the case where you have a lot of servers, coordinating the backup of all the MSDBs could be time consuming.  From a developer standpoint when I have packages on a bunch of development servers I found my method rather convenient.  I was able to collect the latest version of packages and put them in a database.  I tried saving as *.dts files but it was a lot of work to gather the 10 to 12 packages off 3 different servers. 

I also looked into the SQL2000backup mentioned in the other post but I found it to be single server based but to be honest I hadn't looked at it in a while.

I know how busy most DBAs are so I would hate to waste anyone's time but hopefully the article allows one to get ideas on how to attack problems using alternate methods.