And you take your non redundantly stored hard drive out in 5 years and you can’t retrieve data on it.

But realistically, isn’t it worth $60 a year to have a constantly backed up hard drive? The alternative is to take the hard drive out of the safe every so often and do a backup and put it back.

I've recently recovered data from a pair of 15GB and 20GB drives I last used in 2001 (and were stored in an ordinary closet of a house that experienced inside temperatures ranging from 5C to 30C over that time, and great humidity/dryness flactuations over those 17 years). There were 16 bad 512-byte sectors on one of the drives, but otherwise all worked.

Modern higher density drives are probably less resilient, and who knows how flash drives will fair after 17 years in the closet - but my experience so far is that HDDs trump backup tapes on every measure including costs except at extreme sizes (at this point in time, into the petabytes).

I've hard a few hard drives fail in the past decades but I've always been able to retrieve the data. I'm far less confident in a remote company.

Your point is valid and constant, seamless backup is indeed a good thing to have. Whether it's worth $60/year is one's own decision.

> I've hard a few hard drives fail in the past decades but I've always been able to retrieve the data

Care to share what kind of procedures you use?

I've recovered some data for friends and employers who want it back but aren't prepared to pay > USD1000 for it but if I cannot connect to the disk I'm lost.

(My tricks: tilting the disk, freezing the disk, leaving ssds powered on but sata unconnected, and even before that photorec and ddrescue etc.)

Note: don't do any of the above if data needs to be recovered at any cost, in that case just contact a data recovery company.

By putting your drive in a safe, you now have to unlock it, take it out, plug it in, sync, unplug it, and lock it away. Which is a hassle if you want to stick to regular (hourly? daily?) backups.

It is proven that if you introduce friction into process, over time that process will be followed less.