Have you had any luck with this problem? My current project has brought up some of the same questions, and I still don’t have an exact answer. We use Radia (similar to SMS) to package and distribute out solutions from a development environment to a production environment. I have argued that this is not a good idea, but it’s a losing battle, so I go back to my research. Yesterday, I used SPSUtil, and did a successful backup, and restore to a new domain. But I don’t know if this will work with SPS. From all of the information that I could find so far, it seems like you can just backup and restore the SQL database, and then use the SPutil to move the sites. I’m hoping some of the more knowledgeable individual on this board will lend a hand.