I suggest using Carbon Copy Cloner [0]. I have been bitten by Time Machine corrupting itself and I'm never going back. It works well and they have excellent documentation for pretty much every scenario. And USB backups are bootable. I'm mostly using it with backup to a NAS.
I have a 3x backup combo of Time Machine to local Synology (and I may as well not bother with this), Arq Backup to Arq Cloud (not flawless but I trust it more than Time Machine) and CCC to local USB-C SSD drives.
CCC is the only backup I actually trust out of the 3, but it's not automatic and relies on my plugging my backup SSDs in occasionally to clone the whole drive. (Which is more an issue with my workflow than CCC itself).
[0] https://bombich.com/