An Apple fan who has spent “nearly 30 years as a loyal customer” says they’ve been “permanently” locked out of their Apple Account due to what might be the overzealous actions of Apple’s automated anti-fraud system. It’s left them locked out of “20 years of digital life,” and it all started with the seemingly straightforward purchase of an Apple gift card.
If you do store your data, like me, in iCloud and Apple Photos then you should still take a backup.
The easiest way to do this to request a data export of all your Apple data. It’s then prepared into zip files you can download onto a local storage device.
I do it about once a year, which for me is a reasonable balance between risk and impact.
Here’s a guide: https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/get-a-copy-of-your-apple-account-data/
You’re not wrong about anything you’re saying, but I’m learning that a LOT of people are either / or with phones and computers; I know fewer and fewer people who have both. Making a local backup is ideal, but many can’t or don’t have that option.
Agreed, but if the data is important, you need to pay another third party for backups. If something is important and you only have it stored once, that’s on you, no tech is infallable.