I'm currently taking over for someone who was in charge of backing up over 250 servers on different platforms, until we hire a replacement. The main question I have is:

If we use a backup software, such as Symantec backup exec, does this perform the correct backup for MSSQL Server?

I was listening to Stack Overflow Podcast, and I heard them talk about you cannot just backup the SQL data files, but you also need the transaction log? So, if we just backup the whole machine, would we be able to recover it correctly, since we would be backing up the data file and the log?

Thanks!