Not sure how many people were suffering from it, but Google Photos became adamant about pushing ads. I couldn’t find a replacement in Google Store which wasn’t doing the same. Downloaded F Droid, used alternative to website to find apps, downloaded and now the problem is solved. You can use Google Files to install the F Droid apk to start your journey of degoogling. I’m still using some proprietary apps which work with the Android UI such as Google’s Wallet but everything I could replace I did (unless I’d inconvenience myself like with Contacts). The open source apps have much better UIs and don’t bombard me with ads or other stuff the big corp wants to push like their accounts. I wish I had done it sooner and this post was made to encourage other people to do that. I tried Aurora Store, but Google doesn’t let me login. It tells me it would give me a popup to type a number into, but the popup never comes. Anyone knows what app pushes the popup? Is Aurora a full replacement for Play Store or do I need to have both installed?
For remote backup, always keep your data in multiple ‘importance levels’. There’s replaceable, irreplaceable and very important.
Replaceable is non-niche movies and all kinds of other things that are commonly available, data not ‘exclusive to you’. Irreplaceable is data that is (probably) only owned by you - photos, videos, source code, documents and so on. Very important are the few documents you really can’t afford to lose. Security keys, banking info and so on.
I don’t bother backing up replaceable data - I keep one local and one off site backup for the irreplaceable data and very important data (1tb hetzner storage box is enough for me), and I keep a few encrypted physical usb sticks and sd cards strewn around at my parents and at work for the irreplaceable data that periodically get updated.