great advice above. One more I'd add - SQL Litespeed. Works great and has reduced our largest backup substantially in size and time. Went from 60G native to 9GB with Litespeed. Times went down from 90 minutes to around 40 minutes.
http://qa.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/sjones/sqllitespeedlightningfastbackups.asp
Steve Jones
http://qa.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/sjones
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