[ajross]

Right, it's not a problem with technique. There are lots of storage management paradigms whose backup and restore strategies don't involve filesystem copies of the running servers.

The problem here was that there seemed to be no backup and restore strategy at all.

That said, though: if you're a tiny group like this and don't have the time to invest in a gold plated storage design, "Just Back Up All The Servers" is a pretty reasonable choice to make.