My drives are in fire-resistant bags rated for 2000 degrees for one hour.
Those drives are in a fire resistant safe rated for 1700 for one hour.
Flooding isn't an issue where we live. BTW the safe is inside sitting on concrete blocks.
Lightning strike. I have five backup drives and not all are plugged into a usb hub at the same time.
Power supply failure. My notebook and usb hub, so that means the drives also are both on a battery backup.
So, my drives are safe.
I don't mirror.

I think the most frequent reasons I hear online for avoiding cloud services are (1) 'I don't trust my files with the cloud'; (2) the cost; (3) the time it takes to recover a lot of files.

(1) Encryption apps are available so you can back up encrypted files so you don't have to worry about someone seeing your data. Probably useful for financial data but kind of overkill for family photos. And not trusting the cloud thinking they will go out of business can be addressed by using more than one cloud service.

(2) The cloud is insurance. How much is your data worth? You insure your car (required in most states if your car is licensed to go on the road). You insure your home because it's a big ticket item. You insure your health (if you can) because healthy and happy are two sides of the same coin. The cloud will keep your data safe from local and regional disasters. Local disasters happen. Houses burn down. Regional disasters are less frequent, but they happen also. The cloud distributes your data across the country or even across continents, so regional disasters are not a problem.

(3) The cloud is secondary backup. Your local backup is primary. In the event of a local disaster, you can recover your files. Many services will lend you a disk with your data if you need to restore large quantities of data, otherwise, a couple days of internet usage shouldn't be a problem. I have been using Crashplan for cloud backup. They allow me to store my data in the cloud, but also on a local drive simultaneously. If I need to restore files after a non-extreme problem, I don't have to spend bandwidth to do that since I also have the entire backup locally. With versions.

No one system is a perfect solution . Clouds have gone down and millions of files were lost worldwide, never to be recovered, just a fact.

So you need a combination of on-site and off-site backups.

As far as WD disc drives for storage, let me tell you the new reality . For years I trusted and relied on WD large capacity hard drives for storage. Then they one by one died and I had to have professional recovery for my images. I talked with the folks at Geek Squad and they confirmed that the current WD disc drives are NOT of the same quality as in the past, and they at Geek Squad are seeing a large number of dead WD drives coming in for data recovery, more than other brands.

Still have one WD 10Tb drive left working among all my storage drives, but I have moved to Seagate large capacity disc drives and they seem more reliable for me. I also have many SSD drives by Sandisk. Yes I know Sandisk has been part of WD since 2017, but as the folks at Geek Squad said, these Sandisk SSDs and WD disc drives are made separately and on different production lines.

I used to swear by WD disc drives but I will not recommend them anymore. I have had six die prematurely on me, just a fact. I would think it was just my bad luck, but Geek Squad confirms there is seemingly a quality control issue with their WD disc drives reliability and longevity now. Maybe that is why they are priced so low. Think about that.

I wont buy another WD disc drive again, ever, at any price, sorry WD.

FYI, I am a longtime pro with 48 years in the business and my images are precious to me, my source of income, my legacy.

Cheer and best to you

I’d like to see evidence of a MAJOR cloud storage provider such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google or Apple, etc (not Joe’s cloud service) going down and losing “millions of files”. Please post it.

With all due respect, you may be a longtime photo pro, but that doesn’t make you a data storage professional. If you were, you wouldn’t have needed professional help to recover your files from a failed WD disk. You would have simply restored from your on-site backup or downloaded them from your DR copy in the cloud (again, from a MAJOR cloud provider).