NON 3rd party offsite server backup solutions....?

Question

Can anyone recommend a method of an off-site server backup solution that doesn't involve a 3rd party company?
I'm new to server admin and the company I work for is sitting on tons of really, really confidential and sensitive data that we ardently protect on-site, but with all the inclemental weather we've been getting lately (and horror stories from other local businesses regarding their server rooms flooding and such) we've been considering options for offsite backups, but don't want an outside source to have any access to our server contents/data/info in way way shape or form (as in: our backups would be on one of their servers---we don't want to go that route).
Right now we CCC everything everyday to an on-site external drive and then CCCing the server backups onto another external hard drive which then gets taken off-site to the admin's home and brought back in when a backup is going to be made (about once a week for that one).
Any thoughts?
We're absolutely not above buying a second server and running it out of somebody's house for this purpose...but the details of how to configure it as a backup server aren't very clear to me.
Any help is appreciated!
Thanks!
Is there a better way to do this?

Answer 1

ssh/rsync works well for me at home -- local server with a backup copy plus a copy on my brother's server nearly 3000 miles away. Of course, I recommend shipping physical media containing an initial backup to the offsite backup location first to save on bandwidth and time. (Depending on your connection.)
My script is basically:
{quote}
backup()
    src=$1
    dst=$2
    rsync -abz --delete --delete-excluded $src $dst
    echo "Backup starts: `/bin/date`"
    echo ""
    backup /Volumes/backup/Backups.backupdb/computername/Latest/ \
        onsite_server:computername
    backup /Volumes/backup/Backups.backupdb/computername/Latest/ \
        offsite_server:computername
    echo ""
    echo "Backup ends: `/bin/date`"
} > backup.log
rsync -abqz backup.log offsite_server:backup.log
ssh offsite_server "~/bin/backup-complete.sh"
{quote}
backup-complete.sh just emails me using the contents of backup.log as the email body. I used keys for authentication.