You're absolutely right that, depending where you live in the world, the environmental and economical cost to run a computer 24/7 can be non-trivial.
An average computer doesn't really consume more than a couple 100W light-bulbs worth of wattage when idling, and so if you live in a region where energy is clean and cheap (e.g. myself in Montreal) then there is very little overhead.
On the other hand, there are certainly plenty places around the world where energy costs are much higher to both the consumer and the planet, so that is indeed something to consider.
Yes, of course, but shouldn't the backup part be unrelated to the syncing part?
There are many ways to do it, but in my case, I back up my main "on 24/7" workstation (which has all my sync'd folders, whereas my laptop and other machines have a subset) with Arq→S3 snapshots-over-time. And also Backblaze as a secondary backup, just in case, and while they don't support snapshots, they do let me back up 14TB for $5/month.
Duplicati does the client side encryption with the Key never leaving my device? Backblaze didn't offer that when I was choosing a cloud backup and the reason I went with the competition. But Crashplan (RIP consumer version, now only 2x as expensive small business remains) client turned out to be just so ... amateurish in many ways, now that I actually had a drive die on me and need to restore a bunch of data. I'd love to switch to a more competent backup provider and cancel Code42/Crashplan once the restore is done in hopefully 2-3 Months.
Am I right that Duplicati only works with B2, not their cheap $6/device personal backup stuff? That would be a significant price increase. At that price I'd probably prefer the $1/TB/Month of S3 Glacier Deep Archive, though restoring at ~$100/TB seem quite painful.
Duplicati does indeed do encryption locally, although I'm not in love with your options (non-authenticated AES or PGP).
Duplicati doesn't work the other backblaze products, just B2. You can also use S3 Glacier, and I think it's actually one of the better use cases for it tbh (I just avoid giving amazon money all-together).
An average computer doesn't really consume more than a couple 100W light-bulbs worth of wattage when idling, and so if you live in a region where energy is clean and cheap (e.g. myself in Montreal) then there is very little overhead.
On the other hand, there are certainly plenty places around the world where energy costs are much higher to both the consumer and the planet, so that is indeed something to consider.