Thanks for the suggestions so far, I appreciate it.

I should probably go into some more detail here. I have 2 win2k3 enterprise x64 servers in a "server cluster" configuration. Its an active/passive cluster, one handles all the work, and the other one does nothing until the first one fails. Each server has a system drive on it (actually 2 drives in a raid 1 configuration), which has no user data on it at all other than the system state (active directory, etc) There are a few license servers running too. Both servers have a dual channel megaraid SCSI controller, and those both connect to a cluster ready external scsi array. The array consists of 8 physical drives, which are grouped in pairs into 4 RAID 1 sets. SQL Server, IIS, Perforce, etc all run on the files on these drives. I created a sql server maintenance plan to backup all the databases, manage the transaction logs, etc. I don't like the idea of using a special open file backup tool so I prefer to do it that way. I guess im just paranoid, but doing it that way makes it easier to restore databases when something goes wrong (at least thats how I feel anyway). As for the rest of the files on the shared storage array, its easy enough for something like Second Copy to copy the files off there to whereever you want to back them up once a night. As long as you run the backup job when theres not much going on, I don't see any problems with backing up things like perforce, etc etc.

That said, part of the problem is that the "system state" is really spread out all over the place. SQL server may be part of the system state, and I know that the quorum will be counted as part of the system state. I think this configuration causes Microsoft Backup to timeout every time I try to run it with some volume shadow copy error. I did look around the microsoft site for help with this problem, and it did say they were working on a fix for it. They said I could contact support (no idea what that will cost) where they might have a fix for that specific problem, or I could reconfigure my whole setup, or look for a 3rd party backup solution.