Blender is really amazing. The last 3 years have been really good to the project. I forced myself to learn/use Blender 2.79 as an alternative to Maxon’s Cinema4D which I had been a long time user of. It was… tough, but after dozens of hours of tutorials it got easier, then fun, then powerful. Then the 2.8-3.x updates started to roll out! I love Blender now.

It has an amazing real time renderer in Eevee, the Cycles renderer is quite amazing too; Geometry Nodes can do some crazy stuff, but the UI; man has the UI gotten so much better.

If you’ve tried Blender in the past but felt it was awkward, give it another shot.

I’ve used restic in the past; it’s good but requires a great deal of setup if memory serves me correctly. I’m currently using Duplicati on both Ubuntu and Windows and I’ve never had any issues. Thanks for sharing your experience though; I’ll be vigilant.