A backup system in accordance with an implementation of the present invention includes one or more light-weight (i.e., stateless) storage nodes that are positioned close enough to one or more assigned production servers to enable as rapid and efficient a data recovery as possible. The one or more light-weight storage nodes are driven by, and implement backup policies in accordance with, control settings determined by and received from a centralized backup server. Changes to the control settings are simply produced at the centralized backup server and propagated to each storage node in the system. In addition to efficient backup times, general backup administration can be greatly simplified at least in part since a large number of production serves can be serviced through a small or large number of light-weight storage nodes, which in turn can be managed by a single centralized backup server.