Beyond the points already mentioned, here is another (somewhat obvious) one:

Homegrown scripts imply that your customer is taking the burden of
maintenance and enhancement themselves. By using Amanda, they leverage
the work done by Amanda developers and users in their environment. It
will be relatively straightforward to deploy a new functionality added
to Amanda in your customer's environment, whereas your customer will
have to do lot more work on the homegrown scripts to get to the same
functionality.  While the scripts may be ok for their current needs,
they almost certainly won't scale to future needs without a lot of work.

Mike wrote:

Well, I have spent a few days converting a client from a bunch of hand rolled scripts that rcp files all over the place, to amanda. All the while saying that this will be better, this is good, this is how it should work. Of course I couldn't complete it in a day, and there were issues of configuration. So now that I am mostly complete and am ready to put this project away.....

The client comes in today and says "this is taking entirely too long (to get working), and I want a single piece of media with a full backup of everything and my scripts were working just fine"..

To which I say, Uhhh, I mean I was dumbfounded, stopped in my tracks by such a ludicrous statement. So.....

Does anyone have some good business case stuff or other verbage of a paragraph or three that I can use to convince this person that an actual backup program is better in all ways than hand rolled scripts, and that a full backup on a single piece of media may look attractive, but actually is not???

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Chander Kant
LinuxCertified, Inc.
http://www.linuxcertified.com/
Open Source Services, Training & Products