We take full SP backups every night via stsadm. We are going to be migrating from one domain to another, and to do this we are going to build up a 2nd farm, restore an SP backup to it (about a week before the move), fully configure SP with Solutions, SSPs, etc etc (in other words, the Content Databases would be old, but everything else would be the same).Then, the night before the move, we were going to take backups of the Content Databases via SQL Mgmt Studio. We'd then simply detach the older CDBs from the new farm, restore the SQL backups to the new SQL server, and reattach the new CDBs to the new farm which gives us a fully configured and up-to-date farm.My question is, instead of taking backups via SQL Mgmt Studio (or a Maint Plan), could we just let the stsadm backup do its thing, then look at the spbackup.log and map the file names (e.g. 0000001A.BAK) to the proper database name, and restore from there? Or is there something different about these BAKs versus those done via SQL Mgmt Studio/Maintenance Plan?http://sharepoint.nauplius.net

Pretty sure the STSADM backups are not going to be restorable via SQL Mgmt, though I'll admit I've never tried.You can just recreate the web apps/content db's, then use stsadm to just restore back into that web app.

I did take one of the BAKs and used spbackup.log to look up the actual name of the database. It restored OK via Mgmt Studio, I just don't know if there is any practical difference.http://sharepoint.nauplius.net

That isn't actually what I was asking -- I'm asking if you can take a SharePoint farm backup 's BAK files and restore those to SQL via Mgmt Studio.http://sharepoint.nauplius.net

You can restore the SharePoint farm backup’s BAK files to SharePoint content database with SQL Management Studio. However, as Alpesh has mentioned, run thestsadm.exe -o deletecontentdbbefore the restore andstsadm.exe -o addcontentdbafter the restore so that the configuration database will be in consistency with the content database. Gu YumingTechNet Subscriber Support in forumIf you have any feedback on our support, please contacttngfb@microsoft.com