I had 32 Notes (No agent, just the standard Client) servers backing up over
Token Ring.  They all started the backups at the same time, and flooded the
network (I didn't design it, and they wouldn't let me change things).
Backups ran for over 6 hours.  I turned on client compression (These were
Pentium 100 boxes, 128 or 256MB RAM, running OS/2 Warp 3.0), and the backup
window went down to 2 hours.  Since the clients were always waiting for the
token, they could compress "in the background" and save on the network
transfer time.

Along with the other testimonials, I guess this proves "It depends."

Nick Cassimatis
nickpc AT us.ibm DOT com