High availability: you *are* joking, right?

At the moment, I'm working in Red Gate's Exchange Server Archiver team. One of the great things about the way we work is that I sit just across from Scott, who's one of our sales guys, so as a developer I get to hear what customers and potential customers are asking about, what they wish we did, and what they love.

Something that came up this afternoon was a question about recovery of archived messages in the event of a catastrophic failure of the Exchange environment (think: no backups, nothing, all gone). Doing some research around the area, we found the recommended practices for backing up one of the other major archiving tools. It went along these lines (name removed to protect the guilty):

PREBACKUP.BAT:
REM ---------------------------------
REM prebackup.bat
REM This script is to put **** into read-only mode so we can run backups
REM ---------------------------------
net stop /y "*** Task Controller Service"
net stop /y "*** Storage Service"
net stop /y "*** Indexing Service"
net stop /y "*** Shopping Service"
regedit /s c:\readonly.reg
net start *** Storage Service"
net start "*** Indexing Service"
net start "*** Shopping Service"
net start "*** Task Controller Service"

Hang on just one second... your recommended backup plan involves:
a) Having to stop all your services, preventing users from retrieving their archived messages
b) Running a regedit script?!
c) Doing all this in a batch file?

I mean, really? In this day and age, that's a recommended thing to do as part of your regular maintenance plan?

Whenever I'm supporting customers, I always get rather anxious if I think I'm even going to ask them to recycle an IIS application pool, which shouldn't take anything down for more than a second if at all... and as for restarting a machine, well, that's an absolute last resort.

Is it just me?