Well with all the specific advice I've gotten, of course.
Just buy Ghost and do snapshot backups of the PCs to themselves.
Even cheaper, use MSBACKUP to a network share.
Also, the server is more for the application, and I figured I could go ahead and put the backup on it too since it won't be heavy use either way.So you're gonna backup ALL the pcs to one of these servers? Why not to tape? It's cheaper.
For a 30 user load, pretty much any server you get is going to be overkill, unless you're doing SERIOUSLY intensive shit.
MS/NTBackup should only be used as a last resort especially if using it via a scheduled task. Offsite is always a good option. I'm not a big fan of tape myself I prefer spinning disk. I've just had more media failures with tape vs disk. I have an 300TB L700 that just sits around because the tape library media is never dependable.
We used to use Veritas Backup Exec to store on tape media and my jobs were failing for the same reasons as yours I think. I use removable hard drives for back up now since we weren't taking tapes offsite anyways.
We use Veritas to back up to either our Netapp or EMC storage. We attempted to use a product from Syncsort. It was the biggest piece of crap and we ended up getting our 2 mil back from them.
Remedy blows.