I am interested in getting a backup service working for my local network.

I am running CentOS 6.2, I was just wanting some good advice on this subject. I have tried BackupPC so many times but failed to even get that working effectively (well at all).

Is this the best back service to use? If so are there any really good posts either on this blog or elsewhere. I have actually tried a few but non have worked at all so far (this is going over x number of years I have tried configuring this to work).

Any help's much appreciated in advance as usual,
Jeremy.

Do you mean off-site backup or local backup to a local file server?

If you have ssh access to the target, rsync should do the trick; see man rsync for details. I've heard Back in Time, a GUI frontend for rsync, reviewed favorably.

It's local I don't tend to trust offsite backups prefer to make them myself local to the network.

Is that a http based GUI or a Linux OS based GUI?

I know that BackupPC can use rsync as it's actual backing up process among others about 5 I think from when I was looking at the setup configs.

You say you want the easiest and the best but they are seldom the same!

If "best" means providing full, differential and incremental backups with restore of selectable files from a specific point in time to arbitrary locations, the the best FOSS backup solutions for several computers on a network are arguably Amanda and Bacula -- but they're not easy!

If "best" means fully driven by GUI interfaces, I dunno (Bacula has Bat as a management console but configuration is by editing files).

If "best" means "easy to understand and set up" ...

Back in Time is Linux software.

If you're looking to keep multiple versions of changed data on your backup then take a look at DIRVISH.

We use that as we often get requests along the lines of "I deleted document X yesterday / I saved a spreadsheet over document Y can you get them back from an older version?"

We also send the data to LTO4 tape but we use custom scripting for that to allow for encryption.

Here is my backup script that runs every night.

#!/bin/bash
# bash script to backup website
BACKUP_LOG=/home/mike/mysql/website.log

date +"%Y-%m-%d %X" > $BACKUP_LOG

# bash script to backup mysql
MYSQL_USER=
MYSQL_PASSWORD=
MYSQL_BACKUP_DIR=/home/mike/mysql

# backup mysql databases

/usr/bin/mysqldump --user=$MYSQL_USER --password=$MYSQL_PASSWORD --all-databases --lock-all-tables --flush-logs --master-data=2 | bzip2 -c > $MYSQL_BACKUP_DIR/all-$(date -I).sql.bz2


# backup file system
rsync -avh --progress --delete /etc/postfix /srv/www /home/mike/mysql kyrunner@192.168.1.1:/Users/kyrunner/backup

# remove old MySQL database backups
find $MYSQL_BACKUP_DIR -maxdepth 1 -type f -name *.sql.bz2 -mtime +30 -exec rm -Rf {} \;

date +"%Y-%m-%d %X" > $BACKUP_LOG

# send email
mailx -s "Micro: website log" testgamil@gmail.com < $BACKUP_LOG