Yeh, it's hard to get away from apps like G-photos once into them for a while. For some peace of mind you could figure a NAS into your backup scheme if you can afford it. Old style disks are still the cheapest since solid state chips are still so pricy in a NAS especially today with all the crazy shit going on. G-photos make us jump through some unnecessary hoops downloading several years of photos but it's doable.

The whole subscription thing, it's like we are headed for a world where ownership is simply gone. Thank the stars for places like wikipedia(s) and archive.org else we would be missing libraries worth of opportunity and information. Yeh, I support both of those portals even though we don't have to.

Personally being an old guy I've been bitching about moving to subscription models for years. Knowing what one's income is, is reassurance for any online biz, big or small so growing businesses can use that subscription info when they go out looking for any kind of investment capital. Still, I'm way old school and still like to own things but have backups of much of what I have owned over the years. I guess I'm an e-packrat.

When all us boomers are dead and gone, or before that happens, even government taxes and fees may turn into a f'ng subscription. :-)

This is where a pitch for some form of citizen credit economy pitch should go, different than UBI, but our current system over here in the U.S. is really unsustainable in time.