Mike,

I've never had issues restoring from a good file, but I have had files get corrupted and be unable to back up to them. granted it's typically when I've walked into a situation in the v6.5 and v7 days where someone had 20 or 30 days of backups in one file.

The backup devices are left over from historical code back in the Sybase days. I've never seen the need and never used them, using a new file every day for every backup.

That's what I'd recommend, but I'm conservative. I think that the more times to write to the file, the more chance you have of losing multiple backups. But that's me. If it's worked for you, great. I wouldn't say you were being negligent in any way with your system. If I started working with you, I'd go with your system, perhaps argue against it, but I'd keep it going if that's what the standard was.

Different experiences and preferences.