My approach with Google and these other big companies is to use their free services but treat them as disposable. For example: I use Google Photos all the time,

My approach with Google and these other big companies is to use their free services but treat them as disposable. For example: I use Google Photos all the time, but my photos are also synced to OneDrive which, in turn, is synced to my computer giving me offline copies as well as another cloud-based backup. I use Gmail (and old Google Apps accounts) for email, but I have MS Outlook continually running on my desktop PC syncing all email accounts to offline PST files. The key takeaway is to not to get reliant on any service (free or paid) without having a backup plan if it went away.