Does icloud drive contain the photos? My issue with icloud was that as far as I was aware, I could only sync photos via the Photos mac app, or web page downloading a zip archive a few gb at a time. Both options ended up failing for me unfortunately. The Photos app would quit instantly when I set it to sync the library because I guess it was too large perhaps. The web page downloads would time out a few hundred mb in. I tried using third party command line tools for icloud downloads, and they too would time out.

Exactly what I do. I use an old Mac Mini with an attached 5 TB USB drive. This provides a mirror of the iCloud data. For versioning, add a separate drive and use Time Machine. This provides versioning. For offsite backup, B2 or other backup provider.