Just for the sake of conversation, I recently did some crude math on this. I have few friends around who are well capable of running a backup server for me (hardware maintenance and stuff is always needed anyways) and at first it seemed like a good plan. Just get a 4TB SSD/NVME and throw that on a Raspberry Pi (or something small to keep electricity consumption low and setup silent), set up encryption, connect that to my network with wireguard or some other VPN and let it do it’s thing.

But I’d need to purchase everything as setting up a remote location with old hardware is just asking for trouble. The drive alone is 300€ (give or take) and the rest is easily another 100€. Currently my storagebox costs ~10€/month for 5TB. Even if I scored a fantastic black week offer and got everything for -50% discount that hardware with multiple single point of failures would cost nearly 2 years worth of cloud backups. And I’d still owe at least few beers to the friend for the trouble.

Your mileage may obviously vary, there’s a million different scenarios, but for me with my current setup it just makes sense to pick couple cloud providers and let them store my bits instead of getting more hardware to maintain and upgrade.