At $80 U.S. per 500GB of disk space, you slap together an external server whose only task is to backup the replicated database. Oh, that assumes you are running with replication in the SQL server enabled. You want to use the replicated database to prevent excess locking which would occur on a live database.
Any non-SQL files are just dumped off over the network to the backup server using whatever you want to use.
You put that server on a private internal network, behind a proper firewall, and that should take care of the problem. You might lose some data if the live server gets destoyed, but you will not lose all of it. Timewise, you might be down for a few hours.
Then if you want to place the data in a remote location, you do a dump to DVD once every two or three days.
Stuff like this is easy to do. No reason not to be able to do it. It is cheap. You can build a decent firewall from a cheap Intel box, as well as a fileserver. None of that requires a state of the art system.
Hindsight....one thing you learn early as being an admin, you do not have the luxury of hindsight.
