F5 Automated Backups - The Right Way

These are new 7200v's, not yet in production. They had initially come as v11.4.1, we had contracted a PS to get 3 vCMPs configured along with some initial configuration of LTM/GTM/AFM. We had discussions with them about doing the system with v11.5.1 (since there was interest in doing forward proxying on the LTM rather than load balancing to forward proxy servers behind it.) We were strong recommended to not do it, as they considered 11.5.1 too buggy. But, we pushed for it anyways. Though seems there have been other useful things from 11.5.1, like being able to turn appliance mode on for the vCMPs (and being able to turn it off should we get stuck looking on finding a tmsh way to accomplish the task...) Though not soon enough before a different consultant had edited bigip_base.conf to fix a typo that was made during the initial setup using configuration utility. Or finding the tmsh way (which I had done a couple weeks earlier to adjust one of the ip ranges...but not the one that had typo, had entered a range in two places as x.x.x.6/29 when it should've been x.x.x.16/29.) Don't know if the 11.5.1 was done as an upgrade from 11.4.1 or as a new install, I was in the hospital that day, and they were in hurry to get PS working on it, though networking wasn't done until the end of the second day....for only one of the 3 vCMP pairs, and the failover link still hasn't been done.) The only big upgrade I've even done was from 9.3.1 to 10.2.3 (that was a scary 1am upgrade....done a little over 2 months 9.3.1 was to EOL.)