R – Move MOSS 2007 Sharepoint Site to a New Server

As far as I know you will have to reinstall MOSS on the new server as during the configuration process many settings form the acutal server are stored to the MOSS configuration database. So just moving the MOSS software and database won't work. Even just renaming the server on which MOSS is running will probably lead to a MOSS error.

To make it easy to move MOSS to another server in the future you should think about visualization. By this you can move the server to every server you want just by installing the visualization software and moving the virtual machine to the new host server. This strategy will also help you in case of emergency when the MOSS server crashes due to a hardware error.

In answer to the remarks:

There's no checklist. The problem is the dynamic nature of SharePoint. Team Sites come and go, as do documents and libraries. Who's to say one of your users didn't delete a document library and then you think after a restore something is missing.

I think the best bet would be to require your users to do a quick scan after a restore, see if they miss anything major, like sites or libraries that are supposed to be there. You yourself could have a "homemade" checklist that you follow to check if all major features deployed by you (features, timerjobs etc.) are still there.