Question: I'm hoping to restore a backup from SQL Server 2008 into a Sql Server 2005 instance. Is there a way to have Sql 2008 back up in a format that 2005 will understand?

Answer: 
Short answer:

No
--

You cannot restore to a lower major version of SQL Server. 

You can however [Generate Scripts](http://blog.sqlauthority.com/2009/07/29/sql-server-2008-copy-database-with-data-generate-t-sql-for-inserting-data-from-one-table-to-another-table/) from your database for SQL Server 2005, just choose to include data in the wizard, and then you'll just need to rebuild indices and such, once you've run the scripts on your 2005 instance
You can use a tool like Talend to migrate your tables. It has a GUI interface and can work with SQL Server 2008/2005/2000 and is OSS/Free

<http://www.talend.com>