Historically, CRM Online has always provided the capability to open a support ticket with MS and receive a SQL DB backup of an online organization that included ALL data and customizations within that organization, which could subsequently be restored on-premise, stored for safe-keeping, or whatever other purpose desired.
I've had a support ticket open with MS for nearly 2 weeks now attempting to get a SQL DB backup of an online instance. I am being told that this capability has been taken away with CRM 9.x, and now we must use "data extract services" to get our data replicated to a SQL Azure DB , which would also not include our customizations.
My hope is that someone out there is having different luck and this MS support rep is mistaken. As someone who has been using and restoring backups since CRM 3.0, it is extremely hard for me to believe that anything with CRM 9.x could've changed so much that a SQL backup is no longer producible.
Has anyone been able to get a SQL backup generated recently by MS support? If not, any ideas on how we can get essentially a copy of the organization database containing both the data AND the customizations (web resources, plugins, managed solutions, etc) into a SQL database?