I do keep one copy offsite. However, I'm not against cloud backups, I just prioritized setting up my local setup first so that I'm not dependent on the cloud. If I have 2 HDDs + backblaze and one HDD dies, it would be a pain to download 10TB of data from backblaze to set up the replacement HDD. I totally understand your point about running a NAS and I've actively tried to avoid setting one up. My storage system is entirely external HDDs. I want to expand to a NAS in the future but that'll be for fun, not backup (at least until I can afford 3 separate NAS instances for backup).
That being said, do you have any advice on how to encrypt data before uploading to cloud? I'm not at that stage yet so I haven't done deep research, but I've heard of things like veracrypt/truecrypt? And I've heard enough good things about backblaze (and enough bad things about other companies like google) that I'd be comfortable going with them if the price is in my budget and if I can just figure out the encryption angle.
With backblaze its as simple as typing your own private key in a box on the app preferences page, assuming you trust backblaze etc- that's all thats required to encrypt your backups such that backblaze cant decrypt them server side. The caveat is of course if you lose that key, you lose access to your backups and there is nothing Backblaze can do to help.
That being said, do you have any advice on how to encrypt data before uploading to cloud? I'm not at that stage yet so I haven't done deep research, but I've heard of things like veracrypt/truecrypt? And I've heard enough good things about backblaze (and enough bad things about other companies like google) that I'd be comfortable going with them if the price is in my budget and if I can just figure out the encryption angle.