You must back up a few items as part of the upgrade process. After you have created the backups of the following items, restore them into your local development environment. For more details on the deployment process, refer to Chapter 13.
For a guide on performing a database backup for SQL Server, see http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q314546#10. For a guide on performing a database backup in MySQL, see http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/copying-databases.html.