It is not about whether a cloud provider has the necessary failure prevention techniques. This is about sovereignity over your own data.

If you store your data in a cloud, and it is not your cloud, then the owner of that cloud can cut off your access to this data at any time. With the usual contracts, your means to counter such moves are moot at best.

Having important data in your own hands is vital. I do not put data on the net that i cannot afford to lose - either, I don't care (e.g. like the contents of this post, if it gets deleted, I'm not hurt), or I do have the data here, in my own home, on my own servers, on my own backups.

Lemmy tends to forget that we're almost exclusively computer nerds. I've been the voice to my family and friends (hopefully not to a religious point lol) about these such issues, and they're generally pretty receptive. But they aren't going to go out of their way to learn what I have, nor should they. I am merely my network's trusted IT pro, be it game servers for friends or most recently Immich for extended family.

If claiming our digital rights is framed as a free for all, we will never secure any protection before it's too engrained to object. Together, hell look at Lemmy itself, we can not only educate people on these issues, but be the IT role that actually knows how to run whatever service in a secure and truly private manner.

PS I have to give Immich some love here, no matter how many stories like OP's you show to someone, they aren't going to settle for less. And now that Immich is an option for my network, its features make it barely a question for those moving off of google. Another TB of storage? That will be 40$ one time. No nags, no bullshit. And the context search is freaking amazing, without ever having to train some corps model off of (more) of your images.

Its still stupid to trust anyone with your only copy of your important data, who can just disable your account in an instance without thinking twice about it.