All the words of wisdom I ever needed was in Grateful Dead lyrics.

I have a local backup only drive for pictures and critical laptop backups and use rsync nightly. I also do rsync nightly to Backblaze for pictures. Figure if I can grab the drive I will have it stored offsite.

I find ChatGPT excellent to get answers to specific questions without the sales pitch that Google push’s.

A great alternative to Google is selfhosting whoogle, https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search, you get all the benefits and none of the tracking, etc. of Google search.