The best practice for moving content database between two farms

Question

I have two farms both running SharePoint 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2, basically something like a development environment and a production environment. I have a site running on web app - port 80 and it is a puublishing site.

What is the best practice to move my content from my farm 1 (development) to my farm2 (production)?

Creating a content database backup and restoring it to sql on farm 2? or Copying MDF file and log file of content database and attaching it to sql on farm 2?

Please explain why do you say so.

Answer 1

When I need to move content from one environment to another I use backup/restore. I see no reason in copying the files, it's far easier to use the backup/restore routines - also there are often the case that you use other tools than SQL backup to do the actual backup.

Copying the files is also a dangerous option due to file locks etc, and you don't want to take down the farm just to copy the data.

Answer 2

You can use Content Deployment. However, its not a good practice to move content from Development to directly Production.