John,

I can take a backup from the Control Panel, I now know.  But there was no indication of how to do so in the Backup Manager panels or in your KB; and in the course of a largely self-taught computer career that began around 1982, I've learned that the absence of instructions on how to do a procedure frequently means the procedure isn't supported.  And the default output of the Backup Manager is the XML file, if no file extension is specified.  Hence my curiosity on whether an XML file could actually be used to restore a DNN site.

Since you brought up the recent email problem, I will add here that the problem WE are having has not been solved; and one of my major objections to your site is the way you handle email.  It costs us nearly as much to get working (i.e. not blacklisted) email from you as it costs us to get hosting in the first place, and over the last 2 weeks even the "dedicated SMTP" isn't working.  And I mean as of yesterday; I have contacted your support and they said, everything is fine, when our administrator's business email is being delivered up to 48 hours late and going into the junk folder.  And anyone who believes the pricing in your sig had better not plan to be sending much email.

hedera,

although you have already found a solution, common ways to move the database without a .bak file are

- Scripting (this can also work to move a database to a previous version of SQL Server!)
- Detach and Attach