The lack of support, however, is not - and is part of Google’s business model.

Doing this will screw Google’s ability to optimize storage for identical files, which may drive up costs, but it’s the best way to ensure your data stays private.

Host locally and RENT backup servers in couple of places. Those cost peanuts and are highly reliable.

Is there any "grandparent friendly" way to do this today?

No one who works for a powerful entity likes admitting they are more or less powerless to daily statments they see on here.

It's like how anyone with tech awareness watches the goal posts keep moving.. Yes, I know alternatives and mitigation and ECT.

Power is a fickle mistress.

Additionally, making them accountable for these mistakes is a way to actually have them resolve them, so honest or not, it's likely to stop of decrease in occurrence then.

For paying private customers yes I'd day fine but in most of these cases in ruling to bet the "free" 1GB was more than enough

No, but give them a punitive fine (on the order of a percentage of their daily average profits) for failing to live-up to their own expectations set in their own advertising.

Legitimate companies will have no problem with that. Scum that wants to lure users in (to capture their personal data) but doesn't even have the decency to hold up their end of the bargain will have to reconsider whether they still want to provide such a service.

Google Drive is not a "cloud storage service". You're not a paying customer of Google and you have no leverage with them at all. Putting your only copy of any data that you can't afford to lose on Google Drive is just asking for trouble.

> Google for failing to comply with their own implied warranty

There is no implied warranty for a service that's being given to you for free and for which you have no customer agreement or contract with Google. If you want a warranty, express or implied, you need to be a paying customer.