I often perform BizTalk health checks for my customers. One of the checks I do is to see if they are using software that is still supported by Microsoft. I do not think it is per definition wrong to use software that is out of support. It is however a risk that they should know about, so that they can accept the risk or resolve it.

Off course you make backups of your BizTalk databases! You have set the Recovery Model from the databases to Full and every single day your Maintenance Plans or (actually) the SQL Server Agent jobs make Full and Log backups. So in case you need to restore your BizTalk databases, you are safe... Well, I've got some news for you... You're not so safe...

If you make BizTalk Backups like described above, you could be in deep trouble in case you need to restore. When it comes to making backups from your BizTalk databases, Microsoft supports only one way. I'll describe this way, and some insides about it, in this article.

First of all, keep this in mind: "If for any reason your BizTalk Environment has to be restored, or there is a massive change that messed up your SSO and you do not have a backup of the Master Secret Key you will have a problem."

So why this warning?