[Markoff]

30 GBP per year for measly 200GB, I can have 1TB for 40 GBP (and I am talking about more expensive external drive) and I am not scaling it like Google

so no, that's not reasonable at all to pay 4-5 times more for online access to something you can have in safety of your home and actually own and if you keep using the drive for 2-3 years the comparison makes it even much worse deal for Google, after 3 years you are on 90GBP compared to 40GBP for 1TB hard drive, only 11 times more and you still own no hardware, what a great deal!

if you intend to pay as much you might as well buy sinology and have your own cloud through the app in your home without anyone harvesting your data

[sofixa]

Apples to Oranges. Google replicate and have roughly ~ 3 copies of your data, your 1TB hard drive does no such thing, has zero redundancy, isn't available from your phone, can't automatically backup photos from it, etc.

[Markoff]

except only reason many if not most of the people keep using google photos is free unlimited photo backup, let's see how many people keep using it when they run out of those 15GB

you can have redundancy with two drives for price which will pay itself within less than two years and you will have significatntly bigger backup capacity for connecting external harddrive directly to your phone through USB OTG and pressing one button, I find that extremely convenient, after all automatic google backup was pretty fucked up and freezing and unstable for years

what is the most important is you have your data backed up and it does not matter whether you have to connect drive and press one button or it us supposedly done automatically