At work, we have an iMac (running OS X) that shares a partitioned hard drive over the network. I'd like to back up to my partition from my Linux machine. I've attempted connecting via cifs, then attempted to back up using backintime onto an encfs-encrypted volume. This throws up a whole lot of errors, and I assume that it is because cifs is unhappy with hard-links and other unix wizardry.
I seem to remember on OS X that you can create monolithic, encrypted disk images that you could then mount as a "local" (and hence file-system–agnostic) volume. This seems ideal. Hence, I'd connect to the remote volume via cifs, then "locally" mount the encrypted volume as ext4. Is there an equivalent in Linux?