7.6 upgrade - stickies & backup procedures

I think it'd be great to get some 7.6 documentation stickies at the top of the forum.  Anyone have any useful links?

Also curious what everyone does to back up their CMS environment before upgrading?  We run a DB backup, snapshot both our NS and DB servers and have volume shadow copies turned on which so far has gotten us by.

During upgrades I've lost custom sysprep files, 2 files that I deploy via file copy, and image files disappeared going to 7.5 I believe it was.  The image files are so big I ended up recreating those :(

Curious what others are doing in terms of prep for upgrade.