Hi guys,

I need a little help with developing a reliable backup protocol and disaster strategy.

I have recently taken a position with a start-up company, as web developer (Drupal site). However I am now in charge of all IT-related matters lol.
My predecessors (students who quickly built a 'functioning site') have not configured the server (CentOS VPS) in any way...nothing....I even had to deal with a server take-over in my first week as there were no security measures set up and all passwords were changed (including root) - luckily the first thing I did was set up SSH keys!

Anyway, I need to develop a reliable backup/recovery system. Please note that this is a start-up with very limited funding and only one VPS. I have purchased an additional 'backup drive' with our hosting provider that I can access via NFS and mounted to '/mnt/backup'
I need to backup the usual stuff on the VPS (www, configs, etc.).

I have so far come up with the following:
- backup to '/backup/snapshots' using rsnapshot (6 hourly | 7 daily | 4 weekly | 3 monthly)
- upcp (cPanel) backup to '/backup/cpanel'
- tar -cavPf /mnt/backup/$(date '+%A').tar /backup --overwrite (to create a daily archive of the entire backup directory and move it to the 'backup drive')
- rsync (over SSH) the /mnt/backup/$(date '+%A').tar archive of that day, to my local machine
- ....finally (once we can afford a NAS) rsync the /mnt/backup/$(date '+%A').tar each day to the FreeNAS (with RAID)

EDIT: I have rsnapshot backing up the following directories (/etc , /home , /root , /usr , /var )

Does anybody foresee any issues with this configuration?
I realise that this is not a bare metal/image copy but with out limited resources it is the best I could come up with.

One thing I am concerned about is the overall size of the '/backup' directory and each daily archive stored under '/mnt/backup' .
At the minute just one rsnapshot backup takes 5.6GB.
With the setup I have planned we will end up with each daily archive being:

5.6GB x 6 (hourly) [+ incremental changes] = 33.6GB
+
5.6GB x 7 (daily) [+ incremental changes] = 39.2GB
+
5.6GB x 4 (weekly) [+ incremental changes] = 22.4GB
+
5.6GB x 3 (monthly) [+ incremental changes] = 16.8GB

Which will total 112GB per archive of just rsnapshot backups (and there will be an archive for each day = 784GB !)

......................

1. Should I do away with the daily tar backup to '/mnt/backup' and simply use rsnapshot to output backups to both /backup and /mnt/backup?

2. Is there any way to configure rsnapshot to use (for example) hourly.0 as the base and every hourly.# after that beonly an increment, instead of creating a base for each schedule backup (ie hourly.0-5)