Glad your off-site DR copy saved your a$$ - there’s a lesson to be learned from your experience. But, if the cloud worries you (so easy to encrypt your data and hackers don’t care about your personal files - they’re looking for company DBs with SSNs), what should worry you is will that backup drive in the bank actually spin up? (a large percentage of drive failures occur on start-up). Which do you think is more reliable - a hundred dollar drive or 3-5 copies of your data stored at separate geographic locations, in hardened and professionally managed data centers, on redundant storage with redundant servers, networking and power?

I buy the best drives I can and prefer to go with my positive experience with them. Over the 20+ years I have relied on HDs for my business, the only drives that have been problems are drives that were in active use and my SortRAID software gave warning of impending problems before the drives actually failed. I have yet to have a drive refuse to spin up. Also, drives that refuse to spin up can be sent to recovery services avoiding catastrophic loss. I do rotate them so they never spend much time unused. As I said, we each choose the risks we are most comfortable with.

Guess I am 'self-categorizing' myself as more and more time goes by. I seem to be more 'old school' by not trusting the cloud. And I still don't.

I like to control my images and the access to them. I use Seagate 5TB portable USB drives for backup and duplication to a second 5TB drive for greater security. I always have a 'spare' copy of my originals - especially when terabyte storage is so cheap. I keep the original, my retouched transition images and my final image that is ready for publishing. Separate would be copies for a specific output like a printer that will have reduced overall tonal range/clarity in highlights and shadows, etc. depending upon the printer, paper, print size, etc.

If necessary, having control is more than worth the small price I must pay to get it.

And that is the problem with trusting your data to small, non- enterprise storage companies. If it’s a RAID, even though they may call it by a standard RAID level (0,1,5…), the actual way the data is laid down on disk is not necessarily readable by another RAID controller except maybe for RAID 1 (simple mirroring). And a NAS is worse. Why? Because with a NAS, it owns the file system, which to save licensing costs, is usually a proprietary, small company created product. Now since the file system is just behind the OS in terms of importance, do you really want to trust your data to a company that just has a few SW engineers? They may be brilliant SW designers, but they don’t have the resources (or $) to do the kind of testing and QA of a Microsoft. Personally, if I couldn’t afford enterprise class storage from NetApp, EMC/Dell, etc., I’d buy a JBOD (just a bunch of drives) enclosure from a reputable company, and let Windows/NTFS or MacOS create the RAID groups or act as a NAS server (both have that capacity built into the OS). You can bet the file system will be well tested and stable and that the data on disk can be read by any Windows or Mac computer. And whatever you do, keep a DR (disaster recovery) copy of your data off-site, and test your local backup system (backup is easy, recovery is where the potential pain resides).

Just my opinion(s) as usual.