To me: 1. The place to check if everything works is a running system after a restore. None of the rest matters if that doesn't work. 2. If I wanted something

To me: 1. The place to check if everything works is a running system after a restore. None of the rest matters if that doesn't work. 2. If I wanted something simple and reliable, I would spend the money and use tape. 3. If I was rolling my own cloud backup, I would abstract it to work with the Linux Tape API. https://linux.die.net/man/1/mt https://linux.die.net/man/1/mt https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/managing_storage_devices/managing-tape-devices_managing-storage-devices https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp... 4. AWS seems to have anticipated my intuition https://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/vtl/ https://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/vtl/ 5. The caveat is that this is all theory and may not work for your particular needs.