

I was consolidating data from multiple old drives before a major move—drives I had to discard due to space and relocation constraints. The plan was simple: upload to OneDrive, then transfer to a new drive later.
I’m assuming that the reason that he didn’t just do the transfer to a new drive instead of to OneDrive (which seems like it’d be more-straightforward) is because the new drive was going to also be a system disk, not just hold his data.
I think that it would have been a good idea to get a second new drive and have done that transfer just so that there’s a backup. I mean, it doesn’t really sound like the user was planning to wind up with a backup of his data, or for that matter, that he had a backup to start with.
Maybe OneDrive locking the account was unexpected, but drives can fail or be inadvertently erased or whatever. If you’ve got thirty years of irreplaceable data that you really badly want to keep, I’d want to have more than one copy of it. The cost of a drive to store it is not large compared to the cost involved in producing said data.
If you had the wedding photos in question professionally taken, it might be that the photographer, if they’re still around, might have copies. I don’t know whether they retain copies, but I suppose asking can’t hurt.
This place says up to a year:
https://www.wanderlustportraits.com/how-long-photographers-keep-photos/
This guy says forever:
https://old.reddit.com/r/WeddingPhotography/comments/96ckow/how_long_do_you_hold_on_past_wedding_photos/