> When I take a picture with my phone, it automatically gets backed up to iCloud, Google Photos, OneDrive, and Amazon Photos (free with prime).

If you delete a photo on your phone, does it automatically get deleted from all those services in near-realtime?

Do you have an archive solution in place (distinct from your lack of a backup solution)?

I don’t want it to be synced. I want my pictures and videos to be backed up.

I have 2TB on iCloud, 2TB on Google Drive, unlimited back up of photos on Amazon Drive and 1TB on OneDrive. When my OneDrive account gives out of space, I’ll just use one of the other 6 accounts that come with an Office 365 subscription.

I guess for an archive solution, I would use my personal AWS account that’s only used to store my videos that fell off the back of a truck once I took my Plex server off line.

I have 2TB of videos stored in AWS S3 Deep Glacier archive. I’m charged like $2 a month for it.

Yeah, I get your intent, but I think there's some conflation of backup and sync.

Here's a hypothetical - imagine you deleted a photo from your phone, and then modified (in place) a different photo.

Is your expectation that the first would be deleted from the various places you have it backed-up? (If not, then what's your process for fully destroying a photo?)

Would the second be propagated to each of your SaaS storage providers overwriting the existing, or renamed and situated adjacent to the original? And if you modified it in-place a second time?

If your phone were then to stop working and needed replacing, would the restoration process restore your phone to before, or after, the above deletions / changes were made? ie. would the deleted photo exist on your phone, would the second photo be pre, mid, or post modifications?

(I draw the distinction between backups and archives whereby backups get you to where you were most recently (pre incident), and archives let you restore to something like 'Tuesday afternoon, two weeks ago'. I'm talking here purely about backups vs sync though.)

My iCloud backups yes. The others - no.

Great, so it sounds like we agree then.

It gets backed up to all of these? On iOS I have tried all except Google and they are all finicky. Even iCloud/Photos.app seems to have a brain of its own.

And on the Mac Apple engineers have made sure the photos are not synced in a simple easy folder hierarchy that can be backed up elsewhere.

Photos.app is just atrocious.

Google Photos just works.

Yes, I have to launch OneDrive to start the backup and Amazon photos.

>I have absolutely no desire to manage my own backup.

So you have no backup.

What are the chances that Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Google all lose my photos?

100%

Why so many?

iCloud - comes with the Apple One subscription and also for iOS backups

OneDrive - I have an Office365 subscription

Amazon Photos - free with Amazon Prime

Google Drive - inertia and it still has the best search. I had it when it was free, unlimited storage