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Comment by luke0016 | Hacker News Reader

Well, I did suggest a safe. But sure, there are other ways it could be destroyed. As for failure, presumably it's already a back up, so assuming the source didn't simultaneously fail, I can just replace the external drive.

If this makes you queasy, you could always buy a second drive. Two 1TB drives and a fireproof safe, that's equivalent to three years with Backblaze. Still seems pretty reasonable to me.

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Or spend five minutes uploading to the cloud and be done with it.

This is such a ridiculous premise that wastes tens of hours (at least) just to save $10 that I'm pretty convinced you're trolling.

I'm not sure how you come up with $10. Drives regularly last 5+ years. A single 1TB drive at $60 saves me $240 over Backblaze if it lasts 5 years. Throw in the safe, and I still save $180. Two drives and a safe? Still saving $120. I have drives that have gone well beyond 5 years too - so the longer they last, the more you save.

And, what kind of connection do you have that allows you to upload 1TB in 5 minutes? That's spectacular. An ideal gigabit connection is going to take you a good two hours. Even that would be pretty amazing.

One thing to consider as well is that when you get to a certain level of storage, you need a dedicated box (so there is more hardware cost).

I have 50tb of storage in my home server. The electricity cost for this box is about $35 a month.

In my case it is so much strorage that it saves money, but if you have less storage and still need a dedicated box, it would be less so.

A minor point: a fire-proof safe is not absolutely heat-proof. Put one in a fire, and it will heat up inside. Better ones also tend to release water vapour into the safe itself when heated (as a mechanism for keeping the internal temperature down and providing a positive pressure for keeping smoke, fire, and particulate out), which isn't great for hard drives either. I wouldn't rely on an on-premisis safe to prove any data integrity guarantees against anything but petty theft.

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