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Personally I find a couple of hard drives in raid at home the most reliable photo backup strategy. It doesn't protect them from natural disasters, but these are much less likely than a cloud service being bought/sunsetted. I can not even trust Google Photos because since it's not Google's core product I have to assume they can decide to discontinue it overnight any time.

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It could be a good solution but for me the overhead is too high and it lacks many of the benefits of having the data in the cloud. + what happens when there is a disaster, the insurance doesn't cover lost memories.

Specifically about Google, I agree that Google+ Photos (or however this is called) is a strange beast. But it shares storage with Google Drive and in fact Google Drive photos are accessible from Photos. So I use only Google Drive folders for backup. I also believe that in case Google (or any other company of that scale) chooses to shut down a major service it will give a fair notice (don't forget it has business users as well). As for Apple, Amazon, Dropbox, Box, MS... it seems like a core product.

> But it shares storage with Google Drive

Not really.

> Google Drive photos are accessible from Photos

Only one way, read only. If you want to make changes like autoawesome or using the editor, you need to copy the album to G+.

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