I have just installed a 500Gb Network Server on my home network. It lives in the (very) detached garage so should be proof against even quite serious disasters to our house.
However, although it runs a cut down Linux as its OS and thereby provides its services by Samba/CIFS it's not a very good or modern implementation and so it isn't easy to simply rsync files across to it. Using rsync (or the closely related rdiff-backup) results in lots of errors when the backup encounters symlinks, mixed case, etc.
So I suspect I need a backup solution which packs up the files to be backed up into some sort of archive file and then just copies that file across to the server. Does anyone here use a backup solution of this sort and/or know any good ones?