If you are worried about losing data, make a robust backup plan that will protect against data loss. Daily backups that are kept for two weeks, weekly backups that are kept for two months, monthly backups that are kept for two years, annual backups that are kept forever will restrict your data loss to one day. The short term backups should be kept both on site - for ease of recovery and offsite for better physical protection. You don't want your short term backups held only in the cloud. Depending on the size of your database, you could end up being out of commission for a full day because of the slowness of downloading large files.
It is rarely appropriate to split the data into separate databases (or tables) by year. Most applications require some year over year reporting or even rolling 12 months. If you split each year into a separate table or database, this type of reporting becomes very difficult and requires modification EVERY SINGLE YEAR!!! This is not a path you want to go down. In some cases, a company may decide that their reporting requirements go back only 3 or 4 full years. If you then want to archive old data to keep the size of the current database as small as possible, you can run an archive process each year to copy records older than a cutoff date to the archive database and then delete them from the current database. But as long as you are not running into a hard file size limitation, keeping all the data in the same database as long as possible is the best practice.