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Any serious amount of data storage requires a hard drive (as opposed to flash), and hard drives are quite fragile. If you drop one on a hard floor it's probably done. And with time they fail for all kinds of other reasons. They are mechanical devices.

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I seem to have had better than average luck with hard drives; it's been about 20 years since I've had one die while I was still using it. In any case, yes, I rely on a great big hard drive for backup, but it sits on the bottom shelf of a large cabinet; it's not falling any distance onto anything.

What's more important is that I know exactly where it is and who has access to it, and I will continue to have access to it as long as I keep on feeding it electricity.

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