@kashhill it's good to read that they're finally going to improve these policies. I read that article when it came out, and it was the drop that convinced me to de-google and diversify most of my digital life (shortly after, I moved out of google drive, google photos and gmail, though the account is still active for a few harder-to-replace features where moving off google had diminishing returns).

For the record, my current stack is:
- protonmail (paid) with different aliases for media sites, ecommerce, services and friends to defeat account-matching advertising targeting techniques;
- onedrive (paid as part of an office subscription) for smartphone photo backups;
- dropbox (paid) for dslr backups and most documents;
- s3 (I'd say paid, but for the space I use, it's practically free) for more important documents.

The "paid" part is key, since it makes me a client, rather than the product.

@kashhill Semi-quick fix for this: use Google Takeout to extract all your photos, use another file syncing service like Mega or OneDrive for photos, delete Google Photos from your phone(s).

Google is evil. Use Google products as little as possible.

@caffeneko I use encrypted external hard drives, in a rotation. Data is backed up daily if a drive is plugged in. I store the ones not plugged in off-site.

The external drives are not the primary storage, that is on my home server, so migrating to a new backup drive is just plugging in a fresh drive, setting it up, then running my backup script.