Damn! Damn! Damn!

The "cloud" doesn't exist. It's just someone else's computer. Remember "The Fappening" in 2014? It was a valuable lesson that most people ignored. If someone sends me an important picture via phone, the first thing I do after storing it to the SIM card is download it to my PC. I use an old 14MP Kodak EasyShare for pictures, which also go on my PC. Stuff like that is backed up to both magnetic and optical media (CD) so if/when my computer tanks, very little will be lost.

My current dumbphone is a pile of garbage with a worthless camera, but it works as a phone. No GPS, no "find my phone", and no workable internet. It's scrap plastic that rings. My plan from Mint Mobile costs less than $17/month and I've never used 1kB of data. I've never had a smartphone, a.k.a. electronic leash, nor will I. I know too many phone zombies and don't want to become on one of them.
We have a few old flip-phones at the house I tried to re-enable, but all of them are either 2G or 3G, and that's no longer supported. And I really wanted to go the "dumb phone" route this time, but I have a LOT of things I need to get done, and ZERO time to do any research, so I just handed my credit card over and said, "Make it happen, same as my old phone."

So I have a new Apple SE phone, same as my old one.

But I'll be more careful to back-up my pictures (manually, onto our PC) this time around, you can be sure of that!