I agree with your state concerning multiple backups in a single file. Even with all of the redundancies built into our infrastructure.

For our investment accounting system I created a procedure to dump the dbs (full) twice a day. Once before nightly processing, and once after. Then between the two, during the day, dump the transaction logs every 10 minutes.

The procedure tags all filenames with a time stamp. TSM copies all of the files to our DR site. I'm told intra-daily, not sure of the exact time frame. But we keep a rolling 3 days worth of files here, two weeks on disk at DR, and indefinately on tape at DR and also at Iron Mountain.