Hi Sudeepta and thanks very much for your reply. I know about the maintenance plan and agree that it's a very useful tool for generating backups. However, I don't believe the maintenance plan provides the ability to restore all the databases at once - you'd have to individually restore EVERY database. With 20+ databases in our SQL Server instance, we'd like something that would be more automated. Also, we'd like the restore to include the instance itself - meaning that this restore plan would re-build everything from top to bottom.

That's why I was hoping that the idea of simply using a copy of the "Microsoft SQL Server" folder in the "c:\" drive would suffice. But again, I'd heard that that method wasn't fool-proof and could cause problems.

Does anyone else have anything to add? Thanks again Sudeepta and thanks in advance to anyone else who replys!