I never deal with anything mission critical so I'll take your word for it; my own experience is 100% data warehouses where even if there is a lot of data, they're loaded in the wee hours of the night, the reporting services grind out reports before everyone comes to work and then during the day it's all data miners and other ad-hocs who expect moderate to long query times anyway. So doing the direct connection copy all objects method is just yet another long running daytime query. That's how I used to repopulate the development database from time to time and no one ever noticed it to complain. I haven't actually done the script out including data to a .sql file on a 'real' database; I admit that would be a horrendous size text file. I was throwing it out as something to consider as a better possibility than the original.