Great list and discussion.
Way back I fought with trying to get TM working sanely to a NAS and it drove me nuts enough that I ignored years of building and managing some fairly big datacenters with strict backup and DR processes in place (and tested etc). Problems then seemed to be in TM itself and Apple never considering ‘real’ backup solutions, e.g. to network storage not in the same location, etc.) and wasnt even worth trying for VM backups as it was just wholly unreliable.
I eventually gave up on finding a more comprehensive solution, went through Super Duper and the landed on CCC as already mentioned. That’s changed a bit over time to push CCC backups to cloud, and I think the option exists to retain ‘last N’ change, but it’s not block level. I mat give some of the above a look, although in general CCC has worked well for a long hike now.
