I personally believe every scrap of data should be encrypted. Doesn't matter if it's NSFW or an archive of the weather report. Everyone should be encrypting their hard drives so they're easier to securely erase when you need to decommission them. Aside from forgetting the password, there's virtually no downside to you at all.

Veracrypt, FileVault (or APFS encrypted storage) and BitLocker, are all perfectly solid encryption options. I'm not up on my Linux options.

To back up to the cloud, use a tool that allows you to manage the encryption locally, like Rclone, Duplicacy or Arq Backup. Never upload anything unencrypted to the cloud and never keep any unencrypted hard drives around.

This has been my strategy. Keep my encrypted data at home and upload it in encrypted form to the cloud.