Backups must be reliable. They must be on standard tapes in a format that can be read even without access to the backup software. To be cost effective a single server must be able to back up many machines and daily human activity must be minimal and simple.
We struggled with home grown solutions on our UNIX systems for years often employing full- or part-time staff just to change tapes. Later we adopted commercial software to gain quickly the new features we needed: Robot controlled tape library/jukebox, better tape handling, ability to back up non-UNIX systems, and enhanced index of tape contents.
We selected BudTool from IntelliGuard [BudTool] but other commercial products would serve our needs. BudTool's differentiators are (1) tapes are in UNIX ``dump'' format and therefore can be read without BudTool; (2) excellent support for NetApps; (3) use of the Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP) [Stager] open standard for for backup systems to access filesystems, tape drives, etc. over the network. This permits our backup servers to back up file servers to local tape drives or to the tape drives on other machines in the network.
BudTool is as complicated to manage as you make it. We maintain a relatively simple configuration and four huge tape jukeboxes and libraries. We have found their on-site support to be invaluable and worth the expense.
We do not back up our desktop systems. Customers know they are not to store data on them. We help customers conform to this policy by providing sufficient network bandwidth and fast file servers. That is, we make it more appealing to keep data on the server rather than being fascist about enforcing the policy. If a desktop disk dies we can replace it and reload the operating system and applications in about an hour using AutoLoad [Fulmer]. NDMP clients for NT are becoming available now so we are re-evaluating our desktop backup policy.