Hmm interesting. Can you expand more. I've been using samba continuously on Mac for a few years now. It's been good for me so far. There is the need to reconnect every once in a while due to sleep and wake but other than that it's been consistently good

I've never relied on Time Machine as a sole format of backup. If I ever used it I made sure the Time Machine backups were sent to a non-apple storage device.

Carbon Copy Cloner was excellent at creating a bootable backup, and Super Duper seemed very serviceable too.