Move Content Databases in SharePoint 2010

So recently I was working with a large insurance company who had multiple SP 2010 and SP 2007 farms. Each farm had a production, a test, and a dev environment as well. The business owners frequently want to do periodic refreshes of specific site collections from PROD to SYS (test). The issue is they have no granular backup/restore SharePoint backup agents. We are addressing that by looking to purchase Symantec Backup Exec or CommVault or Tivoli Storage Manager or other SP specific backup agents that allow granular backup and restore down to the list or item level. But I digress. Another solution in the interim is to move an entire content db from PROD to SYS. A content db can contain up to 9,000 site collections by default (well 15,000 max but you get a warning at 9k). Well, they had designed one particular app the Newstand to run in its own content db for the very reason that it would grow large in size. However, they failed to communicate that to their team so then another site collection was requested to be put into the db. There were supposed to be custom code changes that did not allow more than one site collection to be created, but those code changes did not work. Therefore, now we have a problem. 2 site collections in one content db, and no SharePoint specific backup tools to move them. I tried the granular backup and restore using powershell and that did not work (well it presented me with 10 errors or so ad I overcome all of them, until the very end when msft tells me - it simply cannot be restored. No other info, lovely!). So what to do, I told the business I am going to just move the entire content db from PROD to SYS and they will have to recreate the other SYS site collections (/sites/marketing/*). So here is how Microsoft says to move content databases in SharePoint 2010: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287899.aspx Enjoy!