Have you ever tried to fully backup data from iCloud?

I try to do it every month because I am that type of techie. They don’t make it easy.

For photos, i have a 2TB family plan. There is no export functionality I can centrally backup my families photos and shared albums

The supported way to do this is to use a Mac, force it to store all images locally in settings, then highlight all your albums and File->export

This takes hours. I need to stay connected to my network drive because I don’t have 4TB of local storage on my laptop. If there is a failure it’s game over. You can’t resume or even know what failed. There is a tiny progress bar icon to work with. That’s all

iCloud Drive? Same thing. You need to force it to sync all your files, and there is no way to know if it’s hung or what. You can’t do this as family account owner for everyone.

What about all that app data that is saved to iCloud? I don’t even know how to access that to back it up.

Apple makes many things very easy and other things practically impossible.

Backing up your entire iCloud data for disaster recovery is one of those things that’s basically impossible.

For whatever it’s worth, insanely enough iCloud for windows makes it really easy to download all of your iCloud stored photos into folders. I have a windows box that I back up my important photos with that way and then move them to secondary backup.

I've found it much easier to request a copy of my data and download it all in 25gb chunks. It's still not great, the download speeds are extremely slow and they are prone to failure. For being something that I (used to) pay for, this was one of the reasons I stopped.

Use rclone...

This isn’t that hard, you can just automate this with a script and cron job running on a cheap Mac mini.