I read a story about a shop that kept point-in-time restore data for all applications on all servers, throughout their history. They could restore any retired server, into a virtual environment, exactly as it had been on the particular day they needed.

One day, this became crucial for legal reasons, and they restored an old server into a virtual environment, with the databases and so on exactly as they had been on the critical day. And nobody could remember what the admin passwords had been, so the data might as well have not existed.

True or not, it was an amusing read. If true, I'm sure it was not so amusing to the people involved.

There are easy ways around that issue in SQL Server, of course.

As for keeping server version data, that's easy enough to do, but it isn't quite automatic. Good point, since it could very well matter when doing a restore.