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I do my backups with Carbon Copy Cloner. TM is even more unreliable on NAS units in my experience.
Not in my experience. Since Time Machine backups started using APFS I've had not a single failure with TM to a Synology NAS backing up three Macs, one wired and two wireless. Before APFS, remote TM backups, especially over wifi, would occasionally fail and require fsck-ing which didn't always work.
 
Not in my experience. Since Time Machine backups started using APFS I've had not a single failure with TM to a Synology NAS backing up three Macs, one wired and two wireless. Before APFS, remote TM backups, especially over wifi, would occasionally fail and require fsck-ing which didn't always work.

How large are your backups? Mine are in the 2-4 TB range. Have never gotten TM NAS backups to work reliably with QNAP or Synology for over 3 years. Even when they are working they are so slow that they can't complete a refresh in an hour which I need since I have multiple active TM backups. The other backups are stalled for hours waiting for TM to finish on the NAS. This is with fast connections - either Thunderbolt or 10 GbE.
 
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I have a Synology DS-218J running Time Machine over WiFi. It was painfully slow even after upgrading to a TP-Link Deco M9 Plus Mesh system which gives me about 200-300 Mbs. I replaced the physical cable between the DS-218J and the TP-Link switch attached to the Deco "Puck" and my incremental backups complete in several minutes. I upgraded the cable to my older DS-210J as well improving its speed significantly to handle archived files. I used a 6' Cat 8 flat patch cable which was overkill but it solved my problem, $14 for 2 cables on Amazon.
 
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How much are you backing up?
Typically its not very much data at all, probably 100-200 MB for incremental updates. Prior to my cable replacement with the Deco Mesh system installed that amount was taking 20-30 minutes of total time including prep and cleanup.I have not benchmarked the details other than it runs a lot faster.
 
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