I'm selfhosting Immich (Google photos clone) on my NAS which has a 70TB's+ of storage. Every night a backup to Glacier runs (which is pennies to store, expensive to retrieve). Every so often I hook up an external hdd and just copy the backup over.

I've had some pretty severe data loss a few years back where I had photos on a cloud service that shut down and I was too careless to properly back them up. Once I got kids I stepped it up a notch and vowed to never let that happen again (the Glacier backup is for when my house burns down or something). Still need to write some proper instructions for my family to retrieve the data if I am unable but they're basically files on a hdd.

As for curating them, I'll leave that to the next person. I think I'd have loved to comb through pics my parents took of us. I do select pictures that are super great and add them to an album. Throwing away isn't worth the effort imo.