We use custom stored procedures and jobs for all our maintenance tasks, the backups hold a single copy locally and mirror/copy it to a remote dedicated backup server where we hold backups for about a week. This is cleared out by a simple vb.net program.

We are looking logging this in more detail and then reading it into a central server for reporting purposes so that we can get an idea of when and how the backups fails.

All routines are currently deplyed from a central server using a vb.net program, this is due to change when we upgrade the server to SQL Server 2008 R2 when we are going to use the deployment options in 2008.

Our estate is currently mainly 2005 with 2008 catching up fast with a few 2000 servers that we hope to upgrade by the end of the year.