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For most people, yeah it's worth it. Afaik, yeah they do allow fully offline backup/restore, you don't need to use iCloud for that.

I switched away to an Android, so this isn't something I'm taking advantage of personally.

> Is this convenience worth sending unencrypted backups of your data to Apple?

iCloud Backups are not "unencrypted backups"

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

I do wish they would bump the backups to "end-to-end encryption" category though, at least as an option.

For most people, availability is the key part of security instead of confidentiality, since for them losing their data is both much more likely and much more painful than someone getting a warrant to take their data from Apple.