Silly if you consider how from a technical and practical standpoint nothing prevents you from carrying a backup of every important document you've ever owned and a good deal of photos and such with you in your wallet on an encrypted mini-SD-card. Wallet gets stolen? Make a new backup. House burns down? You have your backup. Drop off a card at friends or family, keep one at your employer, hell, stick them on the Christmas cards you send out each year to your nearest and dearest; with proper encryption you are the only one able to use them anyway.
It also doesn't help that people blindly trust the big tech companies to do this for them.
3 copies
2 different forms of media
1 offsite
When my music collection was smaller, I had everything backed up onto an external as well as had them all physically burned onto like 50 DVDs. Since my collection has grown beyond a terabyte, however, I haven't had the time or energy to keep that up. Now it's just an external, a travel external, a redundant external, and a cloud backup.
So Disk (HDD) and Cloud is fine. Two HDDs (spinny platter style) would indeed fail the test. If you want to argue it you could probably get away with different manufacturers or different batches but I'd prefer my backups to play nicely with the rules rather than try to avoid them! Far-fetched as it is but lets say for example you have a power surge that takes out your external disk (is that even possible?). Chances are high whatever did that would also do that to your other disk. Or maybe a wall caves in and decimates your PC (or you just sweep the desk somehow and knock everything off it. Maybe the desk has collapsed) - The spinny disks may be destroyed if they are both hit hard enough. Mixing an HDD and SSD, the SSD would probably be more hardy against shock damage.
From another comment I made in this thread somewhere "I consider "cloud" as its own media type to avoid the pedantics of me storing files on a spinning disk and the cloud provider does too. Chances are they have server grade disks and their own backups [so it's different to just a raw disk]"
Edit: I use too many brackets here. I am going to attend my next available parenthesis anonymous support group.
Sometimes, when people buy multiple drives at once for servers, they wind up with drives from the same batch. If the drives are subtly defective, and if they're always run under identical conditions (such as in a RAID array), then I've seen multiple drives fail within days of each other.
Disks exists in two states: failed and failing.
[0]: please feel free to let me know if you know any previous references to this rule.
Partially unrelated I consider "cloud" as its own media type to avoid the pedantics of me storing files on a spinning disk and the cloud provider does too. Chances are they have server grade disks and their own backups. On that note, their backups are not my backups. Their backups are never my backups.
If they save my butt one day, awesome. But that day was already terrible if I'd managed to lose all of my backups.
I have two off-site backups located ~150 miles from each other. If I (we) lose everything, chances are that there are more important things to worry about, like what's for dinner.
He had 2 copies on floppy two on disk (in a separate building) and another set at home on floppy's
That's why in 1979 I used to by 8 inch floppy's in multiples of thousands
Having said that, I did continue scrolling and the article goes on to say
> More generally, relying on the internet as an archive is dangerous.
And it is, at least, another point toward helping me feel vindicated for being that person who always says "and you have off site backups for when your house burns down, right?"