Continue to self host, create a yearly backup on external harddrive which you keep offline at a trusted family members house.

Local storage on a VPS is expensive, and I've never been happy with a lower powered server serving media. Personally I self-host and send a backup to Backblaze B2 for offsite (using Rclone).

I use Borgmatic for incremental, deduplicated backups but make sure you save your encryption key somewhere you can access it if your house burns down.

If you're fine with self hosting, you can just self host it and backup your local drives to a remote location. That's what I do.

For backup software, I use Duplicacy. But Veeam, Borg, etc.. would work just fine. For images, since they're just static files and you don't really need a version history, you could get away with a scheduled rsync job. Though, technically that leaves you more at risk of ransomeware or something that overwrites your data.

For remote storage, I'd first consider a Hetzner storage box since they are flat-rate pricing and pretty dang cheap at $13/mo for 5TB. You might also consider StorJ, B2, S3, etc... I'd just stay away from any lesser known ultra-cheap storage providers.

There are products that will let you back up onto your buddy's free space and vice-versa, but the simplest pricy thing you can do is to drop a NAS at a friend's place and set up a VPN.

But maybe the monthly fee is okay for now. Maybe consider proton for files instead?

At such volume it is difficult to come up a service that does not break a bank. Storage is expensive.

Perhaps immich + monthly backups to S3 glacier. That is if you don't have a second and third site available

I have 10tb and just ended up getting a 8 bay Synology. Practically turnkey and the photo app is pretty nice. A work of warning. Once your photos get to around 7tb, the photo system sometimes crashes. I spoke to a dev at Synology and there is a fix coming.

Reverse proxy if your home internet is decent.

50mbps upload is fine for me.

I had it running on a mini PC with 8tb of storage, but I couldn't get the latency down to where I want it, so I moved it to a VPS.

I use Netcup VPS