I've been reading about backing up files, but I am still not sure what would be the best way to go.

Currently, I have one website on a CentOS7 machine, and it is on a 20GB VPS plan. I will be moving to something like 500GB or 1TB plan in less than a month.

I work on websites with picture galleries (these pictures take the most disk space) and I will be also working on video sites (something like YouTube), so videos will be what takes the most disk space with this. Other than that, just regular websites like vBulletin forum or Wordpress.

With all the above I am wondering what would be the best and most standard and current way (as of 2016 lets say) of setting this up? There is probably paid options, but something free of charge would be the best (and probably command line only).

Like I said, I read quite a lot about it in the books, but the actual experience knowledge (and also based on what I will be working on) is probably the best.

If possible, I would be looking for info on what I should look into (what should I research) as far as setting something like this up.

In general, I am an inexperienced person, and I have some 3 year old websites that I will be moving to unmanaged hosting plan. I want to be sure that I will be able to restore anything that may be needed, and I really dont want to mess anything up. So I could create like two or three separate ways of doing this to begin with, lets say, I am not sure. I want to do it as good as I can, and take into consideration the fact that I am new and inexperienced with this. If something gets messed up, for some reason, I could use another option, and it could be a thrid one too.

Like I said, I can have like 1TB of storage space, and I will be using like 100GB or less for a while, so storage space will be there. Maybe I would need a separate hosting plan for backup too? I am not sure...

One of the things to consider in a backup plan is the various restore scenarios. The most frequent restores will be when you lose a file. So you need to be able to restore a file without having to wade through a lot of compressed data to reach the file or having to restore many files in order to access the lost file's backup.

Another scenario is when you lose an entire drive or an entire machine. In this case you want your backup to be stored on an external drive or on a remote Internet location so that you can recover the lost data without being forced to use the crippled machine.

Another scenario is when you lose the entire system. This happened to me when my house burned down 18 months ago. I lost three computers and my external drive backups. In this case you need backup on either an external hard drive stored off site or on a remote Internet location. So I now have both local and off-site backups on USB external hard drives. I keep my off-site backups in my garage.

You also need at least two generations of backup. This is so that you still have backup from before you made a mistake that you don't catch for a while. How many generations of backup you keep is partially dependent on how much storage space you have available. But don't make the mistake of increasing the number of generations of backup you can keep by compressing the backups. Decompressing the backup files makes restores more complicated at a time when you are in a rush to recover the data.

In order to speed up backups you should use differential backups, i.e. the backup program only copies files which have changed since the last backup.

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Steve Stites