"What is your budget going to support?"
I have $15K US ticketed for phase one, the Overland enclocure with 1 drive and room for a second, plus media and BackupExec Enterprise including remote agents for HP-UX, Linux, Windows Server, Exchange, and SQL this is $3K above the quote to allow for the kind of stuff that happens with these things.
"What is the amount of data you need to backup?"
Today: 120GB. Within a couple of years: A couple TB or so.
"What is the backup window?"
Diffs daily on most servers with fulls on Fridays and monthend. Unix host gets fulls 7 days a week. All done overnight.
"What is the infrastructure designed on - hubs or switches?"
In the main office I'm moving from the legacy dumb switches to 2948-G gigabit switches. Servers are already on their own 2948-G, safely in their own collision domain. I'm planning on setting up the backup server on a backup network and connecting the servers to that network for that purpose. A kind of poor-mans SAN if you will. The eventual goal in say FY 08 or 09 is a fibre-channel SAN.
"What software are you using to perform backups?"
Currently each server has it's own drive and I have a messy hodgepodge of different versions of BackupExec and ArcServ. The goal as above is to have a backup server with agents for the various other servers and services as needed. I like BackupExec because it's only slightly less of a Charlie-Foxtrot than ArcServe.
