Hey @joshua_ong, I’m very sorry to hear about your hard drive failing! I lost most of my pictures from the year 2009 due to that same problem, so I can begin to feel for you, though I couldn’t imagine loosing everything since 2008! God bring you through as you continue trusting him, learning lessons, and laying up treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust (nor hard drive failure) will corrupt.
I do not rely on online storage for backups at this time because it is expensive and time-consuming compared to external hard drive storage.
When I back my pictures up, I do not backup the edited versions. I backup the original with it’s Lightroom-generated XMP sidecar file. Because I shoot RAW on a Canon 5D Mark II, my originals are regularly over 20MB in size. So now you can see that, because of the size and volume of my pictures, online storage would become very expensive very fast, and it would take a long time to upload to the Internet.
Instead, I use an external hard drive system. I store my pictures on one hard drive, and then back that hard drive up onto a second hard drive. I store the second hard drive in a separate location (ideally in a fire-proof safe).
Using multiple external hard drives might seem expensive up front, but I can purchase 3TB hard drives for about $100 US dollars, and one hard drive will last me for several years (even when I shoot tens of thousands of RAW images a year). The price of hard drives is always going down too. And using hard drives, I do not have to rely on Internet connectivity to access original files from the past.
It’s interesting that you noticed that I stored pictures on PicasaWeb. Those pictures are small JPG files I posted for display, so that folks could see my work on the Internet. I share, not store or backup, images in many places on the Internet.
Storage on PicasaWeb is free per picture up to a certain file size (up to 16 megapixels or something like that). This is another reason why I do not use online storage. I believe these are the prices for PicasaWeb: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/2375123?hl=en
In conclusion, I suggest you look into using two external hard drives for storing and backing up your original photos!