Best strategy for offline backup of Octopus instances

Hi,

I have a number of Octopus instances and would like to create an offline backup routine for each of them. This may be more due to my lack of understanding with Rsync and relevant switches (I am using luckybackup as a GUI to Rsync). I have setup ssh keys for each octopus instance (the *.ftp users) to create password less logins and have successfully run the Rsync backup script through luckbackup. However all it seems to create on the local drive is replica of symlink to the actual backup directory and it does not backup any of the tar files.

My thoughts are as follows:
All of my platforms are either based on the Octopus platforms or are custom platforms generated from a makefile stored in a git repo elsewhere - also currently the sites on the server are mainly brochure sites without comments etc. As a result I only really need to backup the regular tar.gz file created by the aegir backup routine. If I need to quickly recreate the server and sites on the server - I should be able to rebuild the server from scratch using a newly provisioned server and the BOA scripts. I can then create new Octopus instances and import the backed up tar.gz files.

My questions are:
-Is the above an ok backup process?
-How do I rsync the tar.gz backup files? Do I use the *.ftp users and if so how do I get rsync to follow the symlinks to backup the tar.gz files. If I need to use a different user what permissions / groups do they need to be able to back up the relevant directories?

TIA,

JamieT