urbackup
IMHO, urbackup is the way to go if you want to backup files over a LAN between your own machines. In fact, as my kids grew up and my home LAN grew proportionally, I even ended up setting up urbackup on a cheap old PC running ubuntu and got excellent results.
The main thing about urbackup is that it allows you to perform system images in addition to file backup very quickly and with minimum disk space (deduplication). I did had to use it once to rebuild a machine with a dead OS disk and it worked flawlessly.
however, if you want to backup files over a cloud repo or outside of LAN, IMHO duplicati is a better option. (in fact I am trying to combine both but I get stuck with limitations due to low-level stuffs)
anyway, going back to your question (ie: using 1 machine to backup others on a LAN:)
- pick one machine with a very large disk, install the server.
- install the client on the other machines…
- you are done.
optionally, you can have another machine backup the server by following these specific steps:
(backing your primary urbackup server on another machine on the same LAN aka criss-cross urbackup)
4) stop your existing server process
5) install the urback server on the other machine
6) install the client on your main urbackup server, configure it to exclude the drive where your store your backups (to avoid doing a backup of backups!)
7) wait about 30 minutes for the 2 of them to exchange their keys and start backing up.
8) restart the urbackup service on your primary urbackup server.