I have been bitten by Time Machine in the past. There is not much more frustrating than a fried computer and a backup that doesn't work and can't be recovered.
Since then I only use Carbon Copy Cloner [0]. It has very very very excellent documentation and it is well the worth the purchase. The documentation covers lots of backup scenarios, how to do recovery and dealing with error cases. It also lets you create bootable backups on external drives, though I have only used it for backups over the network.
I'm not affiliated, but I can't praise their work enough.