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I recently tried a full system restore from Time Machine (from the Disk Utility in Recovery) on a zeroed out partition and it kept failing midway giving me a generic error. Ended up installing OS fresh and restoring files selectively inside Time Machine.

I've lost a lot of respect for Time Machine since then.

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As a counterpoint, I have an office full of Macs and TimeMachine on a Synology NAS. Everybody lurvs it. I have done 3 full restores and 2 migrations with it (not even going to count the number of "oh, shit!" events). It couldn't be any simpler. As the office Mac expert I have to do very little except boot into recovery mode and get it on the network.

I'm not sure what your error was but it might have been for the best. If there was corruption in the backup image then you'd be complaining about how it restored a corrupt backup.

I would expect that it would check the backup on a regular basis and either repair the issue or warn me that I needed to do something drastic.

Just failing to restore is unacceptable.

I also failed my TM restore but that was back in 2007 - it's since improved a lot, but I still keep a roughly 2-3mo old imaged disk - ie, SuperDuper/CarbonCopyCloner. This restore also takes only minutes, as you can boot from external.

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