Wow, what a mess! Sorry to hear you are losing photos.
My keyboard is broken and I have to send in my Mac for repair (hint: Do not spill your morning cereal with milk and sugar on your keyboard). I found out that iCloud is not a real backup of your machine. It saves documents, but doesn’t really save your photos and it doesn’t save your apps. So I am buying a 2 TB external drive to do a complete “image” of my machine so I can restore it. What a pain in the neck!
I do have some large-capacity external drives. I wish there were a way to have everything saved there in real time. Maybe there is but I’m just not aware of it.
That would the PC; not the cell phone.