Backing Up and Restoring Servers on the Server Farm

I was trying to back up a Medium SharePoint Server farm and having a lot of interesting challenges. Especially around the necessary accounts and their rights for SQL and SPS. Following is some information that may help you guys if you looking at doing this. It was taken from SharePoint Portal Server Administrator manual

Backing Up and Restoring Servers on the Server Farm
You can back up and restore an entire server farm, an entire portal, or individual components of a Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 deployment by using the SharePoint Portal Server Data Backup and Restore utility. You can start the utility from the SharePoint Portal Server group on the All Programs menu.

Important You must install the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 client tools on the front-end Web server from which you run the backup and restore process in a server farm.

To back up or restore an image successfully, the following accounts must have access to the directory containing the backup files:

• The service account for SQL Server must have write access to the directory.
• The search service and database access accounts for search must have write access to the directory.
• The current user must have write access to the directory.

The current user must also have the following rights:

• Read access to all SQL Server databases
• Write access to all site databases and the configuration database
• Membership in the local administrators group on the document management server
• Administrator rights on the database server, either as a member of the local administrators group or as a member of the SQL Server 2000 System Administrators server role

The SharePoint Portal Server Backup and Restore utility successfully backs up and restores almost all of the data in your server farm. However, custom Web Parts will need to be reinstalled on every front-end Web server in the server farm. To avoid having to reinstall these custom Web Parts, you have the option of using the operating system backup and restore utility before using the SharePoint Portal Server Backup and Restore utility.