Backing up photos automatically

I've been organizing a virtual happy hour with my childhood friends every Friday since last year, when COVID-19 started. We meet over Zoom and chat about politics, food, and games, mostly. It's been one of the few positive aspects of the pandemic -- reconnecting with old friends and even making new friends, since the original circle of people attending has shifted considerably.

Today my best friend was telling us how he accidentally broke the screen on his new phone. On the phone he had ~2 months of photos of his newborn, which unfortunately he hadn't backed up yet. We looked into ways he could try to recover the photos, without any successful ideas. Since he has an Android phone, eventually someone asked why wasn't he backing up the photos automatically to Google Photos. He answered that he didn't want to give Google access to his photos, which I understand.

While we where talking I remembered that NextCloud offers a way of backing up photos automatically. I quickly set up a VPS and installed NextCloud on it -- it took me literally less than 30 minutes! Before the happy hour was over I told my friend that I had created an account for him, that he could use to automatically back up his photos. I also used the opportunity to set up an account for me, since my phone storage is almost full and I know that Google Photos doesn't store photos at the original resolution.

Now we just need to find a way to recover the photos from his OnePlus phone...