I tend to use Apple’s Time Machine incremental backup to a Synology spinning rust server. I also have an external SSD that I’ll mirror the internal drive to, if I’ll be doing anything dodgy, or upgrading my machine.

That works. TM restores can be quite slow, but almost all my important data is in Git (and hosted storage), so it’s not really been an issue. I just use TM every now and then, if I have a single file I want to backtrack.

I also have one of the notorious[0] SanDisk drives. I don’t use it for anything important. It just has some game storage. Since I’m a Mac user, games aren’t really much of a factor for me, and I won’t cry, if they croak.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/sandisk-extreme-ssds...