While I can’t answer most of your questions, I just wanted to point out something about Backblaze in case you’re not aware of that.
They don’t back up most metadata. So restoring from that Backblaze backup will result in all dates, like creation or modification date, as well as things like tags, Finder comments and any custom metadata to be lost. Your whole database structure will lose its history and potentially more.
Time Machine backups would be better if you have them, because they include metadata and tags.
Arq backup also includes metadata and tags. I use both Arq and Backblaze, but I only restore from Backblaze when I can afford to lose everything about the file, but the file itself.
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