[ValentineC]

> If your nas gets destroyed eg by fire or water or stolen eg by burglar or even the police your data is gone.

Isn't this why offsite backups are important?

Synology has Hyper Backup, and as you mentioned, there's also rclone.

I personally think the biggest benefit to keeping photos as simple files (and maintaining my own offsite backups) is that I'm never at the mercy of one of the SaaS's microservices being down, features being nerfed, or a company being restructured or acquired.

I do see the "peace of mind" that an automatic photo hosting/backup service gives. :) Well, one could always use them all (maintaining file backups and paying for a service like Ente) for real user-side redundancy and convenience.

[schnatterer]

TBH I totally agree with the peace of mind argument You'll have to have the time and skills to get it, though. For my less teach-savy family and friends I always have been at a lost what to recommend. Here, a privacy friendly alternative is huge, IMO. I often recommended to use Google as backup, because it's better than no backup and easy to setup on Android.