How I backed up and locally booted my entire VPS

Like many enthusiasts, I have a free-tier Ampere A1 instance from Oracle. And like many Oracle users, I live in constant paranoia that Oracle will do what they do best and fuck me over with zero warning . The problem # I already had a file-level Borg backup for my data, but I wanted a concrete, sovereign, block-level backup of the entire drive - something I could simply boot up locally as a VM if…