Backing up guest partitions

Hi All

I have been considering the various options for backing up guest
partitions and wondered what other people do.

In my case I am considering backing up the individual hosted
partitions using a quarterly option 21 and a backup strategy tailored
to the use of each guest. I further plan to back up the host
periodically, or as the host changes to capture the full system
configuration. My current thinking is to have a full outage every 6
months. On one backup I will back up up everything, guest storage
(/QPFNWSSTG) included. On the other backup I am thinking of simply
backing up the host and the server descriptions but excluding the
/QPFNWSSTG directory to save time; I am still thinking this through. I
am trying to get to a situation where I can recover a system either
with the hosts intact, or with the hosts to be recovered separately or
not at all.

In the instance where I backup up the guests with individual backup
regimes I am trying to get a balance between preserving the guest
configuration on the host but at the same time avoiding having to save
and restore the network storage spaces when I will (potentially) be
overwriting the bulk of the storage during the guest recovery process.

While considering this I also wondered if while doing a full system
save the guest would remain operational if I took the option not to
end all servers. I'm not in a position to easily test this so I
wondered if they could remain operational. I'm starting to to think
this might be OK.

So what do others do ? What strategies do you have for backing up
hosting and hosted and hosted partitions ? What recover plans are your
backup strategies supporting ?