the life and times of the lesser spotted packet jockey

Time Machine is an easy way to back up your Mac and if you're non-technical, and especially if you don't have multiple terabytes to back up, it's what I recommend.

If, however, you've got the slightest technical chops, consider switching to Arq. It does everything Time Machine does with more configurability, and doesn't suffer from the problem Time Machine has of becoming unreliable as your backup size increases. I can't count the number of times I've validated my Time Machine backup only to find it's befuckled. Arq, on the other hand, has always been rock-solid.

It's not free, but it's worth it. Restoring does not require a valid license; the app will happily start in restore-only mode with no other limitations.

It supports backing up to all kinds of destinations, but importantly also quite happily supports backing up to a disk or SMB/AFP share. Backing up to a SMB/AFP share also doesn't mount the disk on your desktop, which is admittedly a small thing but something that would annoy the crap out of me if it wasn't the case.

You can grab it from the Arq website.