As others have said, torrents won’t work as a backup. This is because when you create a torrent, it isnt uploaded to a server somewhere, other users download directly from you. So if you have it as a torrent, until someone else downloads it, you only have 1 copy.

If you want to use it to upload stuff from your laptop to another PC, then this would actually work, and the only thing needed to avoid it being public is to not share the torrent file itself publically. But there are better tools for this, such as SyncThing. Torrents will work once, but any changes to the files will break the torrent.

You are not uploading, others are downloading. The direction of traffic is the same, but the incentive is different.

Before torrents, there were services where you just announced “there are all my files just download what you want” and some places had quotas on how much you should make available for download. People were sharing all kinds of random trash and also downloading that trash.

A joke was – was it on like bash.org? – that you have some file you want to backup, you have to make people want to download it, so you just call it leaked_celebz_nudez.zip or something and it would be downloaded forever, even if it did not work because so much trash was shared and if could help your quota.

So you’d have to use the strategy in that joke. Make a torrent of your stuff, just encrypted so it is trash for anyone who wants to download it, but you’d have to make the torrent content so imcredibly desireble that even if the comments and ratinfs of the torrents goes to shit, people will still be downloading it in the hope it works. What would be that desireable though, I do not know.