I had a look at Retrospect and it might be a viable option. That being said I was directed to RsyncX by another person. I downloaded it and installed and went through the wizard to set up a revolving backup. However I can only backup one thing at a time with it.

yes rsyncx has not worked for me either. The version is fairly depreciated and uses an old version of rsync. As i said rsync 3.02 has resolved many issues i was having with finder meta data and ACL's.

but it does require some serious reading up !

My company does not mind spending some money on retail software if it means that we will have a solution. That being said I think Retrospect seems to make sense as long as I am able to setup a weekly backup that will run automatically and backup documents, desktop, public, and shared folders on each machine to our server. If it can do that then I can pitch it and get working on it! That being said I am always open to learn more especially about macs, but this is an issue that needs a quick resolution. Then later on I can learn to work with rsync, terminal, etc...

I don't think you ever answered one of my original questions...

How are these Macs managed? Do they all authenticate against an ODM, and are their home directories local or network folders?

Sorry tlarkin, I am not sure what you mean by an ODM. Their home directories are networked folders if I understand. Each person has to "connect to server" to reach their folders. Again I apologize if I am being unclear, I am totally new to Mac servers. I am kinda flying by the seat of my pants right now. :(

ODM = Open Directory Master

Do the homes live on the Mac server?

If so you can manage them to background sync or run scripts from the server side GUI. Or you could make a launchd item run a rsync script every day, or once a week or whatever.

I have a 2 TB FW drive sitting on a few servers that gets a back up tossed onto it. All done via cron, launchd, and simple scripts.

Leopard server (which I am still learning) has more robust GUI options with in server admin and WGM.