I know it is possible to take a manual data export from salesforce, and that once a week an automatic data export is stored by salesforce.

I was wondering if it were possible to export the entire structure definition of my account as well.  This would help in cases where accidental damage was done to our structure - such as a necessary object being deleted etc.  We would be able to quickly return the structure and data to a previous state.

Given our current setup it would take a year to recreate the structure of salesforce before we could even start to import our data back in. 

I read Bretts answer to a similar qn in 2005, and he suggested using DBAMP to export to SQL SERVER, but
1) it is costly
2) it only seems to be the data tables that are linked and not the structure definition
3) i do not think this is really a backup tool.

as an example..  SQL has a flat file export of all database structure, which allows for a 10 second recreation should we have a problem with the database.