Totally get that. You don’t have to back up everything, just the stuff you can’t replace: photos, documents, configs. That set is usually small enough for an old USB drive plus a cheap or free offsite option. Rebuildable stuff (media, ISOs, containers you can redeploy) can skip it. Imperfect backups of the important 5% beat a perfect plan you never get to.

Ha, it absolutely feels like one, right up until a bad sync or a fat-fingered rm hits every disk at once. With 2x8 TB plus a 14 TB, one layout people often land on is mirroring the two 8s (ZFS mirror) for live data and using the 14 TB as a separate backup target (snapshots replicated to it), plus something offsite for the stuff you can’t lose. That gets you redundancy and an actual backup out of the same three drives.