> Gmail is really the only valuable thing that actually ties my life to Google
For me it's google photos. While there are lot of great gmail alternatives these days there's still nothing like google photos unfortunately, is there?
I have my own Nextcloud instance, and the iOS Nextcloud app automatically saves new pics from my phone to the server. But that means that you have to manage your own server, so it's not everyone's cup of tea.[1]
If you are looking for a managed solution, I suggest one of those that you pay for (iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive) since usually, paid services have at least some form of customer service and something like OP's story is less likely to happen.
[1] Also, the cloud provider where I rent the server might decide to block my account for whatever reason. To minimise the risk, I'm planning to store daily server backups on a different cloud provider.
Unfortunatly icloud does not work well unless you are all in on their ecosystem.
I dont have a mac at the moment but have a iphone. Their windows application is very bad, unreliable sync and their web interface is missing a lot of functionality. No linux integration at all, but that is expected.
Onedrive works well for file sync but almost have no photo library + editing functionality.
For me it's google photos. While there are lot of great gmail alternatives these days there's still nothing like google photos unfortunately, is there?