I've been too busy lately, but I have been sent this interesting SPSFAQ by David Lodge that I think might be useful in the quest for finding a better Backup/Restore method for SharePoint. He's using an Exchange backup tool but with some changes to the Registry to make it work for SharePoint. Try it on a test machine! Hope it's useful, thanks for sending it to me David.

SPSFAQ050111 - Are there any alternative ways to backup SharePoint?