This very story is just that - people had their own hard drive and it wasn't maintained for security so it got erased. At least this article needs to be added to your mental list of failures of local storage to balance your news-driven bias.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
If my backup harddrive is in the same house as my main storage and my house burns down, I'm fucked.
If I'm fancy, I may have multiple backend storage providers, too. Lot easier to do that then to have multiple houses. I wanted to use a safe deposit box in the past, but last time I called banks near me, they didn't even have safe deposit boxes available to rent! I can ask some friends, but then will be limited in frequency of updates, still.
(Can we make RAICSP a thing? Or do multi-cloud solution vendors already has a snappy marketing term for storing everything on all of S3, Azure Blob, and Google Storage at once?)
I strongly suspect (as in “for the right price would stake my life on it”) that there are some common failure modes across the major cloud vendors’ offerings.
Your advice is directionally sound (and is what I do for family docs and photos); I just think it has fewer meaningless 9s than you’re imagining.
I believe Resilio can do it, but it is closed source.
If you're looking for backups and not dropbox-like functionality, then something like restic might be more appropriate. It does actual content addressed backups, so you've got history for those times when you realized you messed something up six backups ago.
Just went through this with my family (in Australia) when the local bank branch said they were shutting down the service. It was basically a locked room in their branch, there was no "safe" involved.
If you care about your backups, a single cloud vendor/account vanishing isn't going to be a problem, in exactly the same way that if you care about your backups,m a single drive failure will not be a problem. They are both predictable and mitigable risks.
0.85% is extremely high. I've rolled enough 1s on d100s to know that I wouldn't take those odds!
Obviously customer support is a finite resource.
That's why companies need to start paid/premium customer support: when you lost access to your account, you should be able to pay 10, 100, 1000 of money to talk to a real person who understand how the system works and where there a mistake was made.
Like a hacker stole your account and you cannot take it back? A special person will to do a background check (e.g. call your employer) to verify that you is actually you.
Robot erroneously blocked your account because of misclassified spam-like activity? Your account is restored, and you are fully refunded.
4. My crypto exchange disappeared/went bankrupt/was a scam and now my crypto is all gone.
I swear, some people never learn.
I've seen enough HackerNews articles:
1. My account got deleted and I can't find a human to talk to and all my pictures going back 20 years are gone!
2. A hacker guessed my password and deleted my online presence! It's all gone!
3. My storage provider went bust and all my stuff is gone!