I had the exact same problem and ended up with the same solution. I know people who have had somewhat better experiences backing up to something like a Synology, but the $Xk investment wasn't worth it for me without also needing it for big file storage or media serving or whatever.

> backing up to something like a Synology

How about QNAP? I happen to have one gathering dust, if you can reliably Time Machine to it i'd plug it in.

There are some quirks to setting up SMB so Time Machine is happy, but I have had great success with ZFS+SMB hosting my TM backups. Have been running for a little over a month and nothing is corrupt. Self hosting is still somewhat hard, I don't blame you for bailing on something so critical to uptime in the first place.

My time machine share is backed by ZFS. I have a separate dataset for each laptop, with snapshots retained for 30 days. As long as I know roughly the last time the backup worked, I can restore that snapshot so I don't need to start fresh.

I had the same - ZFS across four drives with separate dataset and samba shares for each machine in my house. It would work and yes, I could rollback to a working snapshot. But it wasn't a set and forget system.

Time Machine has improved a lot after the switch to APFS. Mostly because it supports full snapshots, with an easy way to get the difference between two snapshots.

The previous HFS+ version relied on directory hardlinks that were notoriously buggy and easy to corrupt. The difference computation also required basically recursively walking the entire tree and comparing the directory change times, with each lookup requiring a network round-trip.