Google was much worse back in the years. It's just that people are beginning to notice it more.
Back in those days, for my school project I created an app that had to recognize the hollywood celebrity based on the drawing. Google shut down my android account and then everything else in few weeks citing "copyright and impersonation".
Worse, it shut down my google apps for business account 7 years later because "all related accounts will be closed". Other people faced the same wrath : https://www.androidpit.com/forum/617883/google-suspend-my-ac...
It was a business account and everything including drive etc was gone. The appeal form has automated responses and there is no number to call.
AWS and GCE both provide raw disk space, and certainly, an encrypted backup could be uploaded to them. I would like to be able to put a cap on what I spend on service, in case something goes wrong with the system, which AFAIK, neither GCE/AWS provide, unfortunately.
I would also like it to be remotely accessible, which a simple terabyte drive doesn't get directly.
Now, most of the above (creating a backup, encrypting it, shipping it out to AWS/GCE, securely accessing a drive remotely) are all possible, but none are easy, and certainly not yet at the level of "my mother/father can do it".
I try very hard to maintain a private "cloud", and I find it fairly difficult.
It's a fantastic product that does everything you mentioned. I can't recommend it enough.
(not an employee, just a fan.)
EDIT: I forgot to mention you can set upload limits to keep your monthly bill below a threshold you determine. Very cool.
I backup my multiple TB of data on Dropbox, some on Github (the code and production assets are committed to it), and external drives at least once a month. I think people have a tough time determining what's important (obviously) and are bad at organizing large amounts of data, conceptually more than technically. That being said, if you are going to generate a lot of data worth anything, even your publishing platform gives you an idea to how to structure it.
I know you are probably not referring to the OP here, but "recommending" GCE as a backup service in a thread about "moving your data away from Google" seems a bit odd. :)
My laptop backs up to a 4TB USB portable drive, and that SD card. If my bag is stolen with the laptop and hard drive, then I'll still have the SD card.