This is such a valuable thread! I have read all of your questions/answers and also searched on the internet for more possible best practices and I have wrote an article which tries to summarise all of these ideas and suggestions.

Please find my article here: http://sqlbak.com/blog/backup-best-practices/ and leave a comment if you consider that there is something else I might have missed. I hope this will help others and be a little time-saver.

Otherwise, this is a fantastic forum!