Zeroth, consider GrapheneOS on that Pixel.
First, Syncthing on the PC and Syncthing-Fork. Now you can sync (and anything else) your photo files from phone to PC and vice versa. Congrats, you have photo storage backup.
Second, either a vpn to your home network so you can backup on the road, or Immich (as elsewhere suggested) for your own google photos experience.
Third, whichever of second you didn’t choose.
Fourth, get ye an offsite backup (search 3-2-1 backup). rclone is your friend, but encrypt first locally with Cryptomator, then you don’t have to trust your storage provider.



Eh, Syncthing-Fork is basically feature complete, it’s not even a significant exploit threat (on gOS and constrained to local network and storage spaces in my case, but probably in general). I just pinned it at v2.0.11.2 in F-Droid and will wait for things to shake out. If things go badly there’ll be a Syncthing-Fork-Fork, it’s too critical to too many peoples workflows.