[Scottish] Backing up

[David Irvine]

Dear All,

Just posing the question of back ups,  we have a fairly small office but
a fairly large amount of data, and need some way of doing backups from
various servers etc, we have one big 2tb disk array, at present we have
a somewhat manual method for backing up and restoring, ie, file gets
hosted, and the user enters it in manually again, or if its a big file,
pipes the file system into less and searches for it. *ahem*

Most of us keep some form of backups but its not exactly rock solid, The
majority of the data is backed up once a month (data doesnt change much
and its not critical data, just off site backups of customers set-ups.) 
The problem is the smaller data which resides in users home directories
or on laptops etc, which ironically is the critical data, not very large
amounts, but it changes a lot, and is deemed very important both to
company and to users. 

What backup stratagies are people using? And what pitfalls/benefits do
they have?

I have set a script on most of the laptops that allows users to do a
full backup of their system (using tar) if they like, but this isnt very
economical on space or bandwidth.

Any advice appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

David