at the moment we have a migration project that will utilize entity framework's migrate.exe and update the database models to match the current object models. The solution works great for data I have immediate access to, meaning locally or any that are on our servers. Not only do I update the models, sometimes I add data to populate the new columns as well. Now I'm coming across some clients that want to host their data locally.
The current strategy that we thought of is to grab a backup of their local database, restore it locally onto our machines and update then restore it back to their servers.
My question is what is the best strategy to use to update databases that are located locally and to populate them.