> The "bus factor" is the minimum number of team members that have to suddenly disappear from a project before the project stalls due to lack of knowledgeable or competent personnel

IOW higher == better

There is a bias in technical knowledge. I used to be huge into self hosting but came to the realization that if I died tomorrow my NAS, domain, email and backups of our family photos would work until they don’t. An unpaid invoice, a cancelled credit card, a failed reboot or maybe the nastiest was plugged into a new network.

So in my case increasing the bus factor refers to: a regular usb drive hooked up to the nas that has an unencrypted ntfs drive with our photos and paperless archive; iCloud email that will stay up; Bitwarden hosted on their end.

Same reason I have a very health life insurance and disability policy.

Bus factor being “1” means nothing works if you’re hit by a bus.