First Daily Process:
one cron to copy primarily config files to a predetermined folder, that is alongside another folder that holds all of separate mysql dumps. They are both included in another third cron that does all of the websites and the config/mysqldumps and rolls them up into one tar.gz; which is then moved to a SAN in the same data center.
Second Daily Process:
Is pretty much a series of separate backups for each individual site. Another database dump and copy of the files. One cron for each site that handles it all and puts the tar.gz backups to the same external SAN. I used to have struggles with one particular Wordpress ecommerce plugin and this process helped put me back if the challenges were too great.
Third Daily Process:
Runs in the 2nd 12-Hour period after the processes above are done. It is a proprietary backup software solution that includes the sites, databases, and server configs; that puts the backups in separate offsite storage.
Fourth Daily Process:
Has been a encrypted sync with an AWS S3, but disabled it a few months ago. It seemed that there was a minor error message almost every night. It did help me with a few incremental single-file restores though.
I haven't experienced a catastrophic failure in a while, but one of first three processes above has saved me more than once. Restorations tend to be done using backups from processes #1 and #2.
If one considered the total existence of my XF site, including the years it was a vb3 site, it has experienced at least ten catastrophic failures. One of the backup processes above brought it back with a loss of just a few hours of posts.