Could you elaborate on how Time Machine doesn't work? It's been pretty trouble free for me; other than taking a ridiculously long time for the initial backup with no good indication of progress.
- make a backup,
- have your Mac serviced; it will be returned wiped,
- try to restore from your backup - and it fails. It won't tell you why it failed, only that it failed.
The end.
I do wonder, though, what kind of integrity checks do Time Machine backups have. I've always treated TM as the first line of defence and, as such, it has worked well for me. However, in addition to TM, I have other offsite backups in the cloud for disaster recovery.
x) I haven't had my macs serviced several times, but I have restored from backups a handful of times due to, ahem, accidentally rendering the system unbootable a couple of times.
That said, a friend of mine had been complaining that TimeMachine backup didn't backup anything of his Homebrew-installed stuff...
Otherwise, I don't use TM, I'm using another solution. It won't restore entire system and installed apps, just my files.
So with TM, it was Murphy I guess.
- verify backup.
Goes right after make a backup.
Edit: I must say, when I have to send my machine in, I backup using TM, but I also image my drive.
I'm hoping that it's improved recently which I suspect would happen especially after Apple switched to AppleFS. Time Machine on HFS+ was basically hacks extending hacks extending hacks extending HFS.