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Regarding point #1, we give you two options:
1. Transfer the backup archive to a remote location (S3, DropBox or FTP server)
2. Transfer the files which would end up in the archive to a remote FTP directory. This comes in handy if you want to transfer a site but you don't have enough space to take a backup.

Regarding point #2 we not only give you three (yes, three!) different methods to schedule your backup on your server, but we also provide a desktop interface (Akeeba Remote Control) which can be used to backup any number of websites with a single click - or schedule them for remote backup, optionally also downloading the backup to your local PC and removing it from the server for enhanced security.

To further expand on point #3, Akeeba Backup Professional gives you even more power than that. You can also:
- Exclude arbitrary database tables (either their content, or completely)
- Exclude entire directories, only their subdirectories or only their files
- Use either a point-and-click GUI or the power of regular expressions (PCRE) to effect any of those exclusions.

The basic features you requested (except transferring the backup archive to a remote FTP server) are also available in the free Akeeba Backup Core version. You can check it out and find out if it fits your requirements.

The ability to transfer a large file depends on how you launch the backup procedure.

Using the back-end backup, the altbackup.php, the front-end backup or the remote backup (using Akeeba Remote Control) the procedure is bound by PHP's max_execution_time constraint. If that's about 30 seconds and the uplink between your web host and your FTP server has a steady transfer rate of 1Mb/s you should be able to transfer around 25-28Mb before the script times out. This figure is derived by the 30 seconds time limit, minus 2-5 seconds it takes Joomla! to "do its thing", multiplied by the steady transfer rate.

However, if you're using the Native CRON script (backup.php) using the PHP CLI (Command Line Interface) binary, you are no longer constrained by a time limit and you can transfer a file of any size without timing out. This site is being backed up using this technique, transferring a single, massive, backup archive to S3 every time it's automatically backed up.

I assume that XCloner either made you use this kind of CRON job (running a PHP script using the PHP CLI binary), or it was spawning the command-line FTP client of your server in the background. The latter method is not portable across hosts (most hosts do not even support it, especially the mid- and low-end ones) so I preferred sticking with the 100% portable solution for Akeeba Backup, even though it was much harder to implement.