My company wants to institute a backup plan for all of the clients on our network, which is about 200. We back up our servers and SQL databases regularly, but its been our policy to not backup individuals.

What is most critical for people is their Documents and PST files in Outlook. PST files can be very large, and most people's are ~1-1.5 GB around here. So with PST files alone that is 200-300 GB of data needing to be transferred daily to a sever for backup. Or compressing first, then transferring, but many of the machines are VERY old and such a task would grind their computer to a halt.

Isn't this the reason networks use things like VMware -- to reduce network traffic and streamline backups? Or is this only to reduce hardware costs? Would this much network traffic everyday drastically slow down our network? Enough to the point we'd have to mandate it to be done at night only? Or could we stagger then through out the day?

Really appreciate any input, thank you.