New york has air rights. Many existing buildings cannot build taller, thus redevelopment removes leasable space instead of modernizing and/or bifurcating it.
Yup. iCloud is just my most recent photos. Once my 200gb starts getting full, I go back and delete photos and videos year by year until i'm down to the last year or two. My entire library is still backed up to a NAS which has offsite backup as well as google photos.
Seems like a smart way to do it, but that relies on having another always-on system standing as the server. OP's solution only requires the one device, the rPi unless something needs to be changed.