rsync - Backups

I am putting togeather a backup server that will backup all of our servers and eventually are desktops. Right now I am just trying to get it setup so that it will backup our file server and are accounting server both of which are running linux (ubuntu,debian). The backup server is running ubuntu.

On the server I have two 500 gig usb drives attached.
The initial plan is to mirror the file server to one and the account server to another using rsync. This gives us a 1 day back snap shot to quickly address any "opps" without having to dig through tapes. Then the machine has tape drives running (backupedge) that will archive the data to tape using a 3 week rotation with the monthly tape being taken off site.

I want the two usb devices to always mount at the exact same mount point. I am afraid that if i have to pull them to another server for some reason and the attach them in reverse order that the mount points would change. usb0 would became usb1 and vice versa. This would cause the rsync mirror to be sent to the wrong drive and tape labeling would become an issue if no one noticed it.

Also I would really like to get away from tape completely its just a pain to work with BUT i have to have an "accessiable" offsite backup. With tape i can just drive to our offsite location and pick it up if there were ever an issue with the building. Pushing the data to the cloud could be useful but we are talking about almost 300gigs of data and growing. Not to bad on a daily rsync if its just files that have changed but what happens when i need to restore off site. Pulling 300gigs of data isn't going to be an efficent way to get up and running.

How are you currently handling backups? Data keeps growing (and we are required by law to keep 7 years worth of info). I find i am using multiple tape drives or being forced to upgrade drives (which can be a MAJOR PAIN not to mention you better keep the old drive if you ever need to load an old tape) or add additional ones to handle the extra data.

Suggestions?

I want the two usb devices to always mount at the exact same mount point.

That's an easy one to solve. You want to use partition labels on each partition on your external hard drives. Labeling a partition results in the partition being mounted at /media/<label_name> no matter what linux system I've used. This is great for scripts since the mount point of the external partition doesn't depend on the order in which the external storage devices are connected; they always connect on /media/<label_name> not /media/<device_file>.

To set a partition label, you can use gparted for most supported filesystems:

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/features.php

Or you can use some command line tools:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...tition-628528/

Gparted can be found on any number of livecds but my current favorite partitioning livecd is partedmagic:

http://partedmagic.com/

We are a marketing company and also must keep large amounts of data. Our accounting data and marketing data are stored as either active or archive. The active data is kept on production servers the archive is kept on the backup server. We are using a Quantum DLT-V4 as the tape and 2 500 gig Lacie usb drives. We use Bacula as the backup software.
The archive is tarred and compressed and then burned to DVD's. One on site one offsite. (insurance company requirement for business continuation insurance). A tape is run at the end of the month that backs up everything, archive and active and also taken offsite. On Sunday a complete backup is made of the active files, incremental backups are made daily thereafter. Friday the weekly tape is replaced, and it starts all over again. (no Saturday backup)
The monthly backup takes over 24 hours; but still fits on one tape. The Sunday backup takes roughly 2 hours. The incremental backup takes 15 to 30 minutes.