First of all my thanks and apologies to Adam Goryachev for responding so 
quickly. For some reason when I looked at the forum I didn't see any replies 
until just recently. Perhaps something was wrong in the email list to forum 
routing. 
  Anyway, here goes....

> I would think the *install* of backuppc doesn't modify any content of
> the data directories. However, running the newly installed backuppc
> would eventually run the nightly script, which would expire (delete) a
> heap of old backups (because your config was not what you wanted). Once
> those backups are expired, the nightly script would then prune the
> pool/cpool and remove all the files that are no longer needed by your
> backups, in the process renaming some pool files where files with
> colisions have been removed etc... 

this is exactly right. It wasn't that the install was changing data, it was 
when backuppc offsite server woke up and started removing old backups which 
then modified pool/cpool. hence almost full rsyncs instead of incremental. 

> Why do you need 6TB of space? Do you mean you need 3TB to store your
> backups, and another 3TB for a single copy of all your data (the restore
> tar)? Or is there a temp file created somewhere that needs 3TB? 

yes because I need a place to store this full restore. Which ideally would be 
another server brought over and put on that lan. I could do this fine from the 
gui, but had issues doing it via command line piping to ssh in my lab. Looks 
like it requires a ton of memory.
 
> There is perhaps one scenario you are not protecting against, which is
> sabotage/hacking/etc. ie, an Internal or external agent manages to rm
> - -rf your local backup machine and/or one or more servers on the LAN.
> Will your remote rsync replicate this data destruction. leaving you with
> no backups? ie, the malicious person does the deed at 2am, and your
> rsync runs at 3am... will someone notice in time to stop the rsync and
> save your final copy of the data?
> 

Definitely not accounting for this scenario. yet. and that is a good point. And 
one that I will think about addressing next. 

So your reply really got me thinking about what I really need here. I need a 
backuppc install that is running read-only. More specifically I believe what I 
would need is to have the nightly script disabled. (the one that wakes up and 
removes old backups,prunes cpool/pool).

I have yet to dig deep into how this could be done. But I welcome any 
suggestions. I will of course update this forum posting if I figure it out. 
And again thankyou Adam Goryachev and Shawn Perry for your replies

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