But paying 50 USD still keeps the data in the cloud. You cannot spend money to solve the backup problem, you need a process and quite a lot of technical and organizational skill.

I honestly think there are less than 1 in 100 people who have a working system of backups that would bring them back all their photos taken from their mobile phones.

Since Google turned off syncing of photos to Google Drive, my system broke for instance. Like OP, I haven't had time to set a new backup process up since then.