Hi psiegers,
My setup isn't all that sophisticated and to be honest, I still consider myself to be a newbie at all this. My Dev machine is a laptop and as such is not always net connected. That is the reason that keeping the two sites synchronized is a problem. My version is definitely not "best practices" at all, but it works fine and keeps me from making really dumb mistakes.
The live site, becomes my default "stable" version, and all versions I tinker around with on Dev are a version of the most recent live backup. That way, everything I work on is being tested, by default, against a total system, not just an "ideal" static system. It requires a bit of effort on my part to do it this way, but I believe it's worth it.
Kill your live system with an improperly removed or deleted skin or module once, and you'll never, ever do it again. TrUUUUUUUUssst me. Been there, done that, bought the postcards, the bumper stickers, the T-shirts, sunglasses, coffee cup, and I will never ever, ever, ever visit again! Just the mention of it still sends shudders and chills via special delivery.
OK,,, enough humor for now. If your host did indeed do a "full restore" from the db you backed up from your Dev, then zipped and emailed or FTP'd to them, then it really should be as simple as gaining access to the db with the Username/ password they assigned it, and running that script. If you login with SQL Express, that is a direct login and not a login like the site uses with the site's connection strings in web.config, at least as I understand it.
I really hope this all helps.
Clay