Came across this article today, which relates the case of a widow whose husband had died and Apple denied her access to her deceased husband's iCloud account as "any agreement with Apple is non-transferrable". It took 3 years for her and a pro-bono legal team to win a judgement against Apple, and it serves as an example of why online storage may be convenient, but it should not be your only source of storage. High capacity external drives are cheap, as are NAS systems with secure external access with their own apps.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7043241/Rotten-Apples-cruellest-trap-Think-departed-spouses-digital-photo-album-Wrong.html
I use iPhones and you can copy the entire DCIM folder to a hard disk, USB stick or even burn them to BD disks
USB sticks are larger in capacity and lower in cost which makes them handy for general storage in a family momento chest
t-flash chips can also be used,the small size means many can fit in a pill bottle etc
The problem with external drives and a NAS is they tend to share the same physical location as the data being backed up. So in the case of something like, say, a house fire, it would be possible to lose the original data and the backups. So it wise to use a dedicated offsite backup service so you can easily recover your data. Quite a few are available, and they are licensed to the PC not to the individual. Things like Carbonite and Backblaze are good if you have a lot of data to backup.
Otherwise, things like IDrive and Acronis will probably fit the bill.
True, but hopefully you have an external drive backing up everything on your computer and your NAS locked inside a firebox.
Also remember Microsoft OneDrive is available for Apple devices as well, and doesn't subject you to the same treatment as iCloud, you just need the credentials.
I have iPhone 7, and I had faced storage problem that's why I bought icloud service after free 5GB over, and I upload all of my important files on icloud, I am using Icloud as my primary storage, should I trust or not I don't know, but As of now I had faced some verification issue how to Fix ICloud Verification Failed on my mac?