How many dozens of stories like this do you need to read before realizing that you always need a local copy of everything valuable you store in the cloud?

You are correct, and I deserve the lesson. I'll do as sibling said and schedule it.

Google Takeout can also run on a schedule. You can do a monthly backup and they will email you when it's ready.

The problem with Google takeout is that if you haveany photos, let's say 300gb like myself, you end up having to manually download 50 or so files. This could be easily avoided if photos where synced to a pc like before, unsig Google drive.

You can ask for larger zip files. The maximum is 50GB. It uses zip64 which most modern systems should support. So still 6 files in your case, but at least not 50.