Rush,
Your question seems to focus around backing up user files on a Mac, rather than integration with Active Directory, so that is what I am posting about.
Our church is probably 60% Windows and 40% Mac. We tell all our users that they need to "place their important files on the fileserver - unless they want to risk losing their files in the event the hard drive in the computer crashes." Sounds simple but it works pretty well. We have had some hard drive problems on both Mac and Windows based machines where the user did not follow those directions and they lost there data. The grief they experienced, and the "I told you so" they heard from their peers (other users), just helps to reinforce the point.
Our Mac graphics designers save all their work to the servers. Our Mac video editors save their in progress work to a 2nd local hard drive, and copy completed work to the servers. The Macs used by our musicians are backed up to local drives, and they feel that level of backup is fine (although the lyrics library is back up to the servers. (personally I think the backup of the music files - ripped from CDs or downloaded from iTunes needs to be backuped up to the servers - and we are working on that.) Remote users (for our other campuses) back their stuff up to local hard drives. That is fine for them since the useful lifetime of their documents are short - and anything that has a longer life was probably attached to an email and can be recovered that way.
Our Mac users (and Windows users) know they can lose information stored on a hard drive due to drive failure, damage or theft, so they know that they need to get their important files up to the server. Whether they work off a share on the server, copy the files up to the server (or to an external drive), or simply email their finished document - they really do make sure the files that are important to them are not just located on the hard drive. It is a manual method, but for now it works well for us.
That is where we are at the present time. We are looking to start making more use of Internet based backups solutions to replace our weekly tape backups of our fileservers (we back up our servers daily to drive space on our SAN.) The point being, we are also going to look at Internet backup solutions for those users at remote campuses.
And finally we are going to start using Microsoft's Sharepoint services sometime in the next fiscal year and although we have not completely planned that out yet, we hope to intergrate that solution with our Mac users to help them "move" their primary storage location for important data from a hard drive to the server based storage.
Hope this helps.
John Schneider
Forest Hill Church