Interesting discussion.
One has to wonder if Apple care enough about the whole backups offering they have, or do they essentially just think that iCloud Drive + Time Machine are going to be their good enough solutions for their customers for the foreseeable future?
While iCloud files are of course duplicated in their data-centres, some form of further in-the-cloud backup service might be a future service to sell, perhaps. Though prices would likely have to come down for their cloud-based storage before it’d be viable, me thinks.
I’ve also considered using Backblaze, but subsequently given up on the idea. While they have good sounding solutions to ‘backing up TB’s of everything you own for one small affordable monthly fee’, problems arise when one has to avail themselves of reliable egress (getting your data from them) when it comes to recovering TB’s of data. Some issues I’ve read a lot about:
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Egress (re-downloading) data en-masse online is very difficult and prone to repeated failures, eg. Batches are time-consuming, just 0.5TB each, and prone to failures.
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Their 8TB HDDs have max 8 drives/year (i.e. 64TB hard limit), the rest have to be kept thus paid for. Making larger backups difficult and expensive.
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Recovery is only available from N.American data-centres. So importing those HDDs incurs import duties/taxes on each one for international users. Getting later refunds on those is then time-consuming.
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Back-ups often fail.
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Their customer service is difficult to deal with if and when said issues arise.
The Reddit forums (among others) have had quite a bit on this over the years, and so I decided against using them, unfortunately. YMMV.