[fauigerzigerk]

I'm not denying that it's a good idea to make independent, offsite backups of cloud data for many reasons (even though some cloud services have protections against your ransomware scenario).

But I think it's a bit unfair to blame users for using something like Google Drive as a backup system, because it does in fact have all the main features of a rather mediocre backup system.

Cloud services are supposed to relieve users of some of the traditional burdens of operating computers, such as making proper backups, copying files to multiple devices, keeping it all up-to-date and in sync.

These things are hard to get right. Most people's backups are utterly chaotic, unreliable, insecure, incomplete and vulnerable to some of the same attacks you describe.

[BSDobelix]

>Google Drive as a backup system,

That's the point, OP had it's data just once (on Google Drive), that's not even a bad backup, it's non-backup.

>Cloud services are supposed to relieve users of some of the traditional burdens of operating computers

"Supposed" was never good enough for my data, but now you have Cloud services AND your computer AND you phone AND your password/key AND the chance that they block your account for whatever reason, i just see more burdens not less ;)