Hi there, We have our dev and production in two different domains. Our dev has not been upgraded since long time and it is totally out of sync with Production. We are planning to upgrade the dev so that prod and dev both are exact replica of each other. What is the best way of doing it? Backup restore? But that will bring the settings of production like exchange server and sql settings. All suggestions are welcome. Thanks!

Unless you have applied customizations to Central Admin, I would manually apply the production settings to dev for central admin and then do a backup and restore of the conetnt databases. -- Bryan PhillipsMCT, MCSD, MCDBA, MCSEMicrosoft MVP - SharePoint ServicesBlog: http://bphillips76.spaces.live.comWeb Site: http://www.composablesystems.net

thanks for the response Bryan! yes, we have applied customization. So in that case what is the best way of doing this?

In that case, I would make the dev server a mirror copy of production and then go back and update any settings like exchange to point to the dev version of those settings. The problem is that you want the dev server to match production but you can't have the dev server using production resources. Unfortunately, the more settings you change on the dev server the farther from matching production it will be. You will need to balance that fact against your need to manage the risk of having your code and customizations pass in the dev server but break something when deployed to production. -- Bryan PhillipsMCT, MCSD, MCDBA, MCSEMicrosoft MVP - SharePoint ServicesBlog: http://bphillips76.spaces.live.comWeb Site: http://www.composablesystems.net