rsnapshot: to jail or not to jail

[derailleur]

I am currently using a stand-along system to keep my NAS4Free server data backed up - it's a FreeBSD system that runs rsnapshot every night and keeps about 6 months worth. Unfortunately, that system is long in the tooth and short on disk space so I thought I'd kill 2 birds with one stone and switch to an external USB (WD Duo) backup solution; this gives me more than enough space (room to grow) and eliminates the power and heat from an old computer doing nothing but making backups.

I've had to go back in time to recover files accidentally deleted (and not discovered for a month), which is why I want to stick with rsnapshot, or something that offers the same type of incremental backups allowing me to recover files accidentally deleted more than a week or so ago.

I've attached the USB drive to my NAS4Free server, and I'm pondering the question of running it in a jail, or simply using the technique outlined in http://blog.koospol.nl/rsnapshot-on-nas4free-en.html. I don't know much about jails, so I'm a little worried - would I need to rebuild the jail every time NAS4Free is upgraded? Do jails automatically re-start on a reboot?

Being an engineer, I'm trying to think of long-term implications a well. Are there any words of wisdom on jailing rsnapshot vs. the method in the link?

Thanks.

[raulfg3]

Please read about ZFS And snapshots, is better that rsync.

[derailleur]

I did consider this as my fileserver has a simple ZFS mirror array. While I might use snapshots on the array (I have room), I'd prefer to use a different storage method for true backups (I don't consider anything on the same array a true backup). The other advantage of rsnapshot is I don't have to have a machine that can handle the ZFS snapshot if I have a catastrophic failure of my array, I simply need another machine running FreeBSD since I've formatted the Duo with UFS.

At this point, I really would prefer to go with the solution I know rather than what seems at first blush a more complicated zfs snapshot.