Google's storage plans start at $19.99/year for 100GB. For less than a cup of coffee every month I'm able to back up my photos wherever I am, search across phot

Google's storage plans start at $19.99/year for 100GB. For less than a cup of coffee every month I'm able to back up my photos wherever I am, search across photos, share them easily with iOS and Android users, easily buy larger prints and photo books. Yes, there's the fact that Google scans photos. I personally find it really useful to search for an object or face in Google Photos that other services just don't do as well. >Periodic backup to hard disks seems like the only permanent solution Well of course that's true. Nothing will beat owning a physical copy of your files in terms of backups/reliability in the worst cases. But you can always do both. Upload to the cloud and perform periodic account takeouts of your photos and store them to disk.