You don't have to be a geek, you don't need a rack, you don't need much time to do this. Just buy some external drive and copy at least something there. We're talking about "30 years of irreplaceable photos and work". Doing a backup one time a year would save 90%+ of that data in case of problems, without any need for technical knowledge or dedicating significant time to this.
I agree that the companies should not be allowed to just lock you out of your data like that, but even if there was a strongly enforced law mandating companies to not do this, you still should have some backup. Many things could happen, and doing a simple backup is a very small investment which can save you from losing 30 years of data (even if the risk is very small).
Getting backups right _is_ difficult and can easily be quite stressful. Yes, having some external drives here and there with files would of course be helpful. But then, should you encrypt them in case of theft? Where to keep them in case of fire? What to do with "old" backups (can I trust the drive to live more than 2 years? 5 years?), copy them over to new drives? But what then with duplicated files? I think having backups in the cloud is currently the best "backup and forget" strategy
> Getting backups right _is_ difficult and can easily be quite stressful.
My point was that something is much better than nothing, and you don't need 99.999% reliability in your setup to greatly reduce risk that you're exposing yourself to when keeping 30 years of data in only one place.
> But then, should you encrypt them in case of theft?
Depends on the nature of the data. I guess that most of that 30 years worth of data didn't need encryption, and copying only insensitive data is an option. On the other side, cloud account, or device logged in to the cloud account could be stolen too.
> Where to keep them in case of fire?
That's irrelevant if we're talking about backing up data stored on cloud service.
> What to do with "old" backups (can I trust the drive to live more than 2 years? 5 years?), copy them over to new drives? But what then with duplicated files?
Aside from some unlikely issues, yes, drives should last at least a couple of years. In the 5+ year timeframes I think you could just buy a new drive (bigger/cheaper/more reliable than the last as the technology improves). If we're talking about a lazy strategy of backing up the data once a year, even deleting everything on a drive and copying everything again isn't that bad. Better than nothing.
> I think having backups in the cloud is currently the best "backup and forget" strategy
But we're not talking about having the cloud as a backup. The issue here is having the files only in the cloud, with no backup. For a non-technical person, cloud as a backup is great, but here we have a case where a person had all their data only on the cloud, and then lost access to the cloud. If the cloud was only a backup (or a way to sync/access the data on other devices), but the data would still be present on some private device, there would be no problem.
I agree that the companies should not be allowed to just lock you out of your data like that, but even if there was a strongly enforced law mandating companies to not do this, you still should have some backup. Many things could happen, and doing a simple backup is a very small investment which can save you from losing 30 years of data (even if the risk is very small).