In the past few weeks, there have been a handful of changes on the AFS backup front:
1) Implentation of persistant disk caching for backup files.
2) Recoding of some of the major utilities into perl (primarily to make
it easy to implement (1))
3) Splitting of the home* backup volumesets in to 6 ((there used to be 4)
And, we might be moving forward with plans to move to an on-disk only backup system, while still running our fulls off to tape for just that extra redundancy.