It's why the paid services are successful. Another option I heard about is to have a "data buddy" so you both install a NAS at each other's house, sort out access etc and that's your off-site.
Yeah. My solution is raspberry pi w/WireGuard + HDD at inlaws. Initial backup was done locally, nightly backups rsync'd over (I don't generate a ton of data, so it's mostly just photos from my phone).
We "only" have ~35Mbps upload, but that's plenty since the initial backup was the only large transfer. Daily backup transfers are generally pretty small for me.
But getting the initial transfer done locally was definitely important for my use case!
Exactly --- this is ~10GB every 6 hours (which is probably a reasonable amount of time to run a backup while not interfering with active Internet use).
Basically the only backup-worthy content I generate is casual photos and videos, and these are nowhere near that size (Immich database backups also take up a bit but I could certainly be smarter about how I handle these backups).