It's sort of a weird space we're in in the modern world, where you have to assume that anything on a "device" is ephemeral and fragile, and those of us concerned with data persistence on local hardware need to work at having a path to verifiably-restorable backups.

Cloud is a great solution for most people. But not really an option for "where do I put my decades-stale collection of old home directories" or "mbox files from email in the late 90's".