That super sucks. Stories like this (but about Google Photos) led to me setting up the following backup strategy.<p>1. First, all photos are on a fat external harddrive connected to a homelab server. When I come home with photos, I dump them onto this (TODO to find a way to automatically copy them into the proper spot off the camera upon the camera being plugged in, or a different spot if the gopro is plugged in)<p>2. Once a day, these are rsynced to a separate set of harddrives, which serve self hosted photo software I use (similar functionality to google photos. Looking for a replacement that lets me create arbitrary albums of photos, and then create web pages pointing to those arbitrary albums, that's FOSS. Currently evaluating photoview and librephotos)<p>3. Once a day, all photos are backed up to a backblaze b2 bucket using duplicati. with several previous versions also kept.<p>4. Once a year, a fucknormous external drive is purchased, all photos dumped onto it, and mailed to my parent's house, where they put it into a firebox.<p>5. Oh, and all my photos are also uploaded to google photos, because why not<p>I'm very much a scrub when it comes to sysadmin tasks and was able to set up all of the above with about... I don't know, no more than 100 hours of effort I'm sure, probably less. I recommend at least looking into consumer backup services like the one by backblaze!