what would be an option to still do it locally? without sending it to the cloud? probably needs a good compression

You could have a big external USB drive and try a deduplicating backup software such as borg backup or restic.

	▲	articsputnik 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		borg is one that pops up all the time, maybe i need to look into that more deeply. I like rsync, but it's creating huge backups. thanks for the suggestions and help, much appreciated.