While that shell script + cron solution gets rained on a lot, by and large, it's quite an effective method provided nothing else breaks. It's possible to write scripts that are quite robust with error checking, conflict detection, checksums etc... It all comes down to how important your work really is. If you can survive without it, then it's toward the 'less' important end ;)

I'm currently running a web server in the test phase and the forum script auto-locks and archives threads as html files after a certain period without replies. This is significantly easier on resources since I don't need to hit a database to serve essentially static content. Basically the URL is SHA1 hashed and that gets split a few times to make directories where html file goes [ don't want 8000 files in one folder ;) ]. Now this kind of thing is ideal for the cp + cksum treatment via shell script and cron. Does it fail occasionally? Of course! But that's why it will try again and if it fails one more time, it will send me an email.

Basically...
The hiccups come if you want complex versioning of sorts with your backups. This is especially true of constantly edited files like office documents or Photoshop/Gimp files. The best in that case (again, depending on how important this stuff is to you) is something like FreeNAS.

I'm allergic to most things "cloud" ;) "Cloud" turns computing and backups down to "magic" pretty much. And I don't believe in "magic" ;) My stance on that is simply : *You do not own what you cannot control*. It's nice to think storage solutions like Dropbox, Google Drive, Ubuntu Cloud etc... or proper backup services like Carbonite et. al. are there for you, but you don't know how or where they store your stuff. If it's just family pics and stuff, it's probably not a big deal, but more sensitive things really don't belong there. Add to that the current atmosphere where authorities basically have the gall to say they can peek at your junk because you're not storing it and you have a recipe for mistrust that leaves quite a bad case of indigestion.

Of course, I'm also keeping backups for other folks who use my services (don't know what they're storing and don't care) so if I were to lose any of it, I'd need a one way ticket to Mexico :P