What I'm looking for is an example database or table that has meaningful data to work with.  It'll take me all day to add 100,000 rows of test data into...

If you are not backing up your transaction logs and have no need for point in time recovery than you should change the recovery model of your database to simple. ...

To answer your question, there is nothing wrong with running backups in parallel.  If your system is I/O bound you will see a performance hit by doing so.

Every best practices guide out there says that you should absolutely backup to disk first.  Disk gives you faster backups, faster restores, more reliability, and more options than you have...

So far so good over here!!

Also take a look at table partitioning in SQL Server 2005.  In SQL 2005 you can partition a table into multiple filegroups giving you substantial performance and storage efficienty enhancements.

Try doing a RESTORE HEADERONLY FROM ... and see if there are multiple backups in the file.  There will be one row in the result set for each backup.  If...

Couple of other things?

Why not try backing up LiteSpeed to a SAN disk.  You've noted that SAN backups are substantially faster than a backup to a TSM server.  LiteSpeed backups...

Althought not explicitly clear in the review, the reviewer seemed to be comparing using LiteSpeed directly to a TSM server (not backing up to disk) to using TDP to backup...

This command is simply building a restore string.  After this is run you can run the restore string by running exec sp_executesql @bkpstring

I personally do not like running sql this...

In the scenario where you do a native backup or litespeed backup to disk and then have veritas pick the file off of disk and send it to tape, is...

What script are you running?  What error messages are you seeing as output or in the SQL Server error log?

You're a perfect candidate for a backup compression utility like LiteSpeed for SQL Server from Quest Software.  LiteSpeed compresses your database backup files by 75-95% so they can be written...

I've been able to put data files on external drives as long as windows see's the drive as a physical drive letter.

Tape is a very volitile media and Disk is much more stable.  I highly recommend backing up to disk first so that you can be sure that you have at...