I just so happen to be doing the same thing now, spending my whole work day emptying my Laptop of the files from 4-5 years of chat history (the phone chat also copies over the the desktop version). Thousands of files, every little gif, meme, video and photo over so many years...

Too much to go through and organise what to delete and keep, so I'm just copying it ALL over to external to make space for this blasted Starfield game.

if I lose my phone then I lose those 3 years photos forever. :P

Also yeah this happened to me a few times. My phones in the past just die, or screen death and can't transfer, etc. There's some amazing memories out there forever lost to time. Sigh. (pretty much all my phones from the last 13+ years are in a little tub, in case I find a way to recover them one day heh)