Source: Linux Format Annual (2022) Volume 5 (TCB3790)
Page: 49
- Keep all of your photos (including those from your phone) in one directory, and important documents in another.
- Keep large datasets that can't easily be replaced on their own drive.
- Segregate system and user file backups.
Data stored on Dropbox, iCloud, Google Drive or Amazon S3 (or any other cloud storage service you'd care to name) is unlikely to just vanish in the way that data stored locally would if your hard drive goes kaput (as long as you pay your bills, of course). Yet these suffer hard drive (or solid state, tape, or Blu-ray) failures all the time. They have their own advanced back-up and replication methods to cope with this (as well as preemptively retiring old hardware). The actual disk you're accessing could fail as you download a file, yet you might not even notice the delay as a back-up volume is transparently spun up.
Off-site backups are an excellent idea, since they mitigat not only against hardware failure, but also against combustion and burglarisation.A10-drive raid array with triple redundancy will be duly decommisioned by fire or flood, or will be an attractive target for a thief with a penchant for storage.