Thank you very much Stefan for the clarification and recommendation. We do also have a restriction on how long the farm can be unavailable to users as our business runs 7 days a week. Taking all servers offline for snap shot, and then backup the database (which will take roughly 5 hours according to our DBA) means there won’t be much time left to proceed to install the actual update, which had taken up to 3 hours just for binary installation to one of our QA servers.
Do you know if there are any documented backup and rollback processes specific to installing SharePoint updates? I’ve tried to search the web but haven’t had any luck.
Thank you again for any input you may have.
Kind regards
Conway