If you've been living in the Apple ecosystem for a while, where 1 TB on your laptop is precious, realize that both SSD and spinning rust drives have plummeted in cost over the last decade. You can get a 12TB drive on sale for $175. That's $15 per TB. If you want something mobile and convenient, 2.5" external drives are ~$100 for 4TB. If you need speedy disk, a fast, 1TB m2 NVMe SSD can be had for just $100.
Really, for just $200 you can get two external drives (always have a backup) and have the peace of mind that all your photos are 1) safe, and 2) in your possession.
> Photos are the only things I don't have backups for due to their sheer size
The bottleneck here isn't storage space. It's bandwidth and transfer time, given Android's crappy file system interface. (iOS, of course, has none.)
I kept up with Google Photos backups for almost a year. But ain't nobody got time for that.
You would pay way more than that to get them back, if they were lost.
I'd actually pay more for a fixed feature set if it means less instability.
They all support automated backups to storage either that you have at home (say, on a NAS), or someone else's cloud.
Dropbox also makes it easy to back up to a hard drive I have in my possession. When combined with Google Photos, it's N+2 redundancy for ~$12/mo.
Any insights? Which photo services are the best?