• Interesting.

    I am not sure why those statements were mentioned. I have done enough upgrades, and never went with this approach.

    May be you need to send a note to him asking for the reasons.

    in my opinion, you can take file based backup of the files, treating them as another file, like a .dll or program file, which will allow you to restore the system, in case of a system (I mean the Windows system) failure, you can restore the system.

    Assuming that you need to take some precautions, you need to stop the SQL Server instance and perform a file backup.

    I still believe that you should not restore them unless you have a crash.

    Cheers,
    Prithiviraj Kulasingham

    http://preethiviraj.blogspot.com/