We have several SharePoint servers. Our best solution was this, and what we found to be easiest for our needs.

WSS has a built in backup utility. We use these to backup the individual sharepoint sites to a local disk.

We configured our SQL server with a maintenance plan, that backups the databases to disk. Mind you, Sharepoint is in a single SQL database, and all the individual sharepoint sites are inside this single database, (Least my understanding of it.) So we now have SQL maintenance plan dump backups to disk as well. The maintenance plan also deletes backups older than 2 days old. (Same for the WSS backups.)

Networker via the standard client then backups these two directories.

We have had to do sharepoint restores for clients before, and this method has worked flawlessly and given us the least amount of headache versuses using the SQL agent and doing a hot backup of it via that.

Also, it is much easier to restore a site instance using the WSS utility then trying to recover the database back into SQL etc.

Last note: we are using WSS 3.0

Thanks
Paul

do you want a granular backup of your portal farm , or do you want to setup NMM to take a VSS backup of the Farm

granular would be : NMM client on the frontend , you could still use the regular SQL client to backup the databases

VSS : NMM client on all servers on the farm


NMM would not be the recommended option at this time to backup just the database , unless things have changed recently