In order to keep your VMware environment up to date with the latest features and bug fixes, we all are not able to avoid to upgrade our virtual center server from time to time(check Virtual Center 2.5 Update 3). To minimize the impact on the previous data and record, you may want to backup the DB for your virtual center servers. Here is how I backup my DB in SQL 2005 in a very simple way.

Open the management studio in SQL 2005 and connect to the SQL server engine that manage the virtual center and update manager DB. right click and select stop the database engine. Follow by that, open you my computer and browse to the folder which contain the DB and DB log for your databse.

The path of the DB folder could look similiar as D:\SQL2005\MSSQL.2\MSSQL\Data

Look for the DB file which end with .mdf and .ldf.

These is the files you need to backup to restore your DB in the future. Copy those files to a safe location. Once you had done that, you can easily continue your virtual center upgrade as require.

You can copy to a network share drive, backup tape or any storage you need. Backup DB is so simple.