We had a Kenmore upright for nearly 40 years. It had cooling tubes that ran through each wire shelf, and kept food for a long time, even through many power outages. It was not an auto-defrost model, and we had to defrost it about once a year or so. Earlier this year, it finally died. We went to get something out for dinner, and found it was nearly 25° inside. We defrosted it and gave it four hours to cool back down, but the temp never got below 50°, so we got a newer model upright. It has been excellent for the few months we have had it, and as a bonus it has a high temp alarm that sounds if the temp is over 20° for longer than a few minutes.
I prefer an upright, as my family had a huge chest freezer and I remember it being a pain in the butt to sort through identically sized butcher paper wrapped meats from a processing house, and I nearly fell in several times over the years. We also lost several things that got buried, and defrosting that beast was nearly impossible. Guess that's why we rarely did.