Never save your stuff on somebody else’s storage. Ever.
Very sound advice, I have pictures as well as tons of files dating all he way back to the early days of computers over thirty years all kept on auxiliary hard drives. As hard drives became better and more reliable I kept up dating and transferring the contents. I never would trust any outside source for keeping my files, pictures as well as financial info safe and secure and so far it had served me very well.
For years, I kept all my photos on hard drives inside my house. I had three large drives and would rotate them. I always hated having to plug them in and run the backup software.
I then tried using an Apple Network Attached Drive (their “Time Capsule”) with the Apple “Time Machine” software. It worked pretty good and quietly backed up my computer to my personal cloud in my house. But the Time Capsules were notoriously unreliable and Apple discontinued it.
I tried backing up to my home Synology NAS, but that didn’t work very well, either.
So I went with Apple’s iCloud. Apple takes security a lot more seriously (IMO) than Amazon and Google and is a lot more trustworthy. But my photos are in their cloud and subject to loss. I sometimes move all the photos down to my local storage, but I’ve gotten lax about that. But overall, I love the convenience of iCloud and the seamlessness between my phone, tablet and laptop. A pic snapped my phone is in the cloud in seconds (usually).
Of course, my first few thousand photographs were on Kodachrome and Ektachrome starting in 1973 and I’ve still got those slide. They are all digitized, too.
That is the way I store. Important stuff gets saved on two separate physical devices.