If you are new to AX one of the things that I’d encourage you to do is just play with the data. Setup data, post transactions. It’s sometimes helpful to be able to play but then restore back to a point to try something a different way. Given data in the application is controlled by dates especially things like date effective elements like policies, organization structures, worker appointments etc. You might want to be able to test a change but come back to it again and test a different way. This is a quick walk through of taking a backup of the AX database on the demo VM.

Now if you backup you might want to be able to restore so this is a quick walk through of the restore.

No keep in mind as I mentioned this is just backing up and restoring the core AX data database and model database. This is similar in R2 and R3. In R1 and RTM the model was in the same database as the data so there is just one database. Also as mentioned in the video this is not backing up all the other related DBs like SharePoint DBs, retail DBs, SSRS reports etc. these are possible to do the same obviously but require a bit more work or scripting. But for most functional data experimentation then the core AX DBs will be good enough.

Cheers

Lachlan