by prmoustache 11 hours ago
Cloud storage do not help you sharing that old photo album with friends spending the night in a cabin far from the closest cell phone coverage.
Also, cloud service typically move your older stuff to colder/slower storage which are painfully slow to retrieve whenever you decides to do it. I realized this when browsing some old pictures before closing a google account I had not been using for years except emptying the gmail inbox every few months.
I personally prefer having a local copy of my files and syncthing them to my NAS at home (which is itself backuped in a storage in the cloud).
The iCloud backup built into the iPhone for me seems quite seamless. As I mentioned in another comment, I have several thousand photos and videos that don’t fit on my phone because it’s only a 64 GB device. It’s been this way for many years. But I can still scroll back and see all the photos. And when I click one I view it instantly. I’ve never noticed any lag or any problems associated with the cloud backup. It feels to me exactly the same as if they were local.