All day, we’ve been talking about SharePoint Designer becoming available for all. We’ve been talking about all these great opportunities to create Data View Web Parts and workflows, or blow up our sites.
But here is a question to which I haven’t found any clear answer: the backup/restore feature.
From the SharePoint Designer help:
Suppose that your team has just posted their latest quarterly reports to various document libraries on the team site, and you want to back up the site at this critical juncture. Or suppose that your team has been moved to a different group in your organization, so you need to move your team site to another server. You can use Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 to create a backup copy of a site or subsite, and then re-create that site on the same server or on another server.
Sounds great. FrontPage also had this feature, and I used it quite a lot.
However, when I started using it with SharePoint Designer, I quickly reached a “limit”: the backup/restore feature only worked for sites smaller than 26 MB. The tricky part is that SPD won’t alert you during backup, you’ll only discover the issue when trying to restore the site.
An Internet search confirms that others have had similar issues, but I haven’t seen any mention of this from Microsoft.
Maybe now would be a good time for a clear status update on this issue?
Path to SharePoint... and Beyond! 
You’ll likely want to use SharePoint Content Deployment Wizard available on Codeplex.
We’ve been using it for several months, and it has worked very well!
That and the problem of delete the part when you modify the new and edit pages.
You can use SPD to backup and restore a site just use the instructions here http://www.dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/mwherman2000/archive/2007/07/26/271409.aspx
Thanks you both for these references.
This however doesn’t address the key issue: how to prevent users from being trapped. What I am looking for is a clear status update from Microsoft.