We have very minimal backups. About 6GB total (including Server 2008R2 OS), and it changes maybe 30MB a day if that. We have an extra server (Dell T310) sitting here with 4 3TB drives in RAID 5. It will basically be used to store a local copy of our main DC and files, and then the plan was to rsync that over to a computer at another office.
Originally, we planned on using Norton, Acronis, etc. and just doing a "backup plan" that would be full weekly + inc daily. Put a full copy of two weeks of that on this Dell T310, then rsync that over and store 2 weeks of that on the offsite server. So we have the current 2 weeks locally available, and 2 weeks prior available at the offsite location.
- Is this an ok plan?
- What OS or software should we use on the T310? Cost is not an issue.
I'd strongly consider running Windows Server 2008 R2 on the Dell T310 and making it a secondary DNS server, Domain Controller, and Global Catalog server. You could even go so far as to keep the filesystem layout similiar on the T310, allowing you to "fail over" to it as a file server (by adding an alias name, for example) in the event the production file server fails. Since you're talking about so little data (6GB seems pretty low if you're including the OS-- are you sure you didn't mean 60GB?) you could easily keep a copy of the "live" for this fail over purpose in addition to the backups that your backup software maintains.
Insofar as the backup goes, using whatever third-party software you want seems reasonable. I don't think you're going to get much delta compression from rsync, but it'll certainly mirror the files to a remote server effectively.
Edit:
The built-in backup utility works well but has some limitations. Chief among these is the handling of multiple generations of backup.
If you expose the storage on the T310 via iSCSI and mount it "locally" on the source server you can use the native Windows Backup functionality to store multiple generations of backups on the T310 in a single backup folder. If you expose the storage via SMB (i.e. a "shared folder" accessed via a UNC) you can't store multiple generations of backups in the same folder. You can do incremental backups but only the most recent generation will be available.
I'd keep it simple and use built in Server Backup feature, and have it do two backup jobs:
You can have the scheduled jobs point to the other server's share. This works great when you only have a few servers.
Even better, for full server recovery, you just boot to the 2008 R2 disk and choose recovery and you can pull the image backup over the network.
I find this much simpler and full featured in small scenarios.
I'm not familiar with rsync but you might want to look at DFSR (Windows Server feature) for replicating changed blocks offsite. You can control sync time, bandwidth used, etc.