It's not only the bandwidth restrictions, but, isn't it also a pain when you need to wait 3 days to have a fully functional node up & running again?
I know I'm just 16 GB of RAM short from making this 2 days less 
Other than that, it's up to you to decide whether or not that wait is a pain. I'm not using Bitcoin Core for anything that couldn't wait for 3 days.Quote
Yeah, that's cool. I could also add an encryption password on the compressed file, instead of messing with encrypting the entire disk which takes time. So, one layer of encryption on the .tar file, another on the wallets themselves.
That makes incremental backups a lot more difficult. I used pigz for my test, which compressed better than bzip, but there's probably compression software that offers better results at the expense of slower compression.If you'd be running a pruned node, I'd say a backup (~15 GB) is worth saving a ~700 GB download.
All this is coming from someone who had to restart a new IBD a few times over the years after I did something that fucked up my data directory.... I still don't have a backup
