Thanks for feedback!!
It was great you still had a working machine. So many people have Time Machine backups they don't realise are useless.
Please NOTE:
Because you only test a backup at the point of purchase of a new machine or worse failure of old one, people seldom realise their backups which show no apparent problems are in fact utterly useless.
Time Machine was a great invention.. Apple has let it go to the dogs.
I strongly recommend
1 Use Carbon Copy Cloner to create a bootable clone. You need a suitable USB drive. For Catalina that means SSD or fast desktop type drive not portable. You can test the clone occasionally by simply booting from it. There is no easier backup test in the whole world.
I know for laptop use plugging in a drive is a pain.. but even if you do it ad hoc once a month that gives you a simple way to recover a faulty machine or migrate to a new one. One external drive can be partitioned and used for 2 computers if you wish.
2 Use CCC to do daily backups to the TC as you would with Time Machine now. CCC can be configured with multiple tasks. So ad hoc backup to local drive and regular sequence backup to network target like Time Capsule.
It is not as good for recovering the 10th iteration of some file you worked on as Time Machine. However it has one big advantage.. it works. Particularly for recovery as Migration Assistant will work fine from CCC clone.
