Yep, you're unlikely to get a better deal than what Google provides if you're looking for cloud based.
But — "the cloud" is a vague term.
Let's say you have a PC with a hard drive attached to it. If the PC has an Internet connection, you are technically able to access the files on that hard drive from anywhere in the world (provided you configure certain software to allow you to do so). At this point, you're looking at your own "cloud".
If you switch that PC and hard drive out for a Synology NAS with 2 or 3 hard drives, then you have a dedicated personal cloud.
Also, while it's great that Google provides several TB worth of storage, there's no way for us to know when that will go away. I'd rather have my most precious documents under my control - either backed up and archived on tapes or optical drives, or even digitally on flash drives.
I'm more thinking about off-site backups that I don't have to manage. All of my family are out of town and not tech savvy, so even simple things can become tedious.
I do keep a 1:1 copy of everything from my Google Drive locally, I just like knowing that it wouldn't be lost in a fire (along with being able to use Google Photos on-the-go). I was considering something like Backblaze but haven't looked too much into it.
Yep, you can have Google Drive pull down data on a PC with Backblaze installed, which will then sync to an offsite location with the entire Google Drive data.
You know, maybe we should have a community for self hosting on here! There's quite a bunch of us into it, and given the nature of Lemmy, I'm sure a lot of folks would want to get their feet wet.
Definitely a solid idea. If you want to seed and mod, I can set it up tomorrow. Could be worth seeing if anyone from /r/selfhosted or similar are interested as well?
SyncThing can sync photos to anywhere you like. Set it up on a small VPC or whatever, mount Backblaze B2 as a fuse drive with s3fs, and put your syncthing dir in there. Easy offsite backups