If you need to back up less than 10 GB, you can back up your data to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage for free with their b2 sync command. I use this in a cron job daily or hourly, depending on the data being backed up.

I self-host my own SearXNG instance and haven’t had any errors like that in the ~6 months it’s been running. It’s just anecdotal evidence, but I would imagine any such low-traffic instance would be able to avoid the blocking and other issues that high-traffic instances run into.

Mobile or desktop? Libredirect on desktop allows you to enable a ton of pre-populated Searx instances in the Search category, so it will use any of the enabled instances in your list.

I don’t believe it picks based on reliability but it at least saves you the time of manually picking/editing your instances. If one is troublesome, just remove it from the list.