Also do bear in mind that failovers are never completely seamless. In-flight transactions do not fail over, and your connections will drop for a short while. Your application will have...

I agree; backup and restore if you can.

Thank you; I've fed that back to them, but felt I should check in case I was viewing it differently.

Great, thanks. That's what I think too. My take on this is that writing "scheduling tail-log backups" when it actually means "scheduling transaction log backups" is misleading.

Thanks, John. Would you take a tail-log backup every 10 minutes (say)?

SP1 to SP2 isn't an upgrade though, it's a patch.

I agree with Jeff; stop doing the manual shrinks. Well, do a final one and then start taking your transaction log backups more frequently, say every 10 or 15 minutes...

You should be able to attach them. In SSMS right-click on Databases and select Attach, then browse to the correct directories.

As above, but also which version are you trying to install? I think only Standard edition can be installed on Windows 10 (?).

The }7} at the end of the file name indicates to me that this is not a database backup, but an application-consistent VM snapshot. Talk to your VM admins to...

I don't think you can. Your connections could be passed through to the databases in your new AG by any of the other listeners on the same instance, though (although...