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It is smug because, to GP's point, a dismissal of a very real problem with hyper-consolidated markets that allow the most powerful entities on earth to abdicate their responsibility, and foist it upon the people least equipped to handle it, all in the name of "personal responsibility".
I agree that the companies should not be allowed to just lock you out of your data like that, but even if there was a strongly enforced law mandating companies to not do this, you still should have some backup. Many things could happen, and doing a simple backup is a very small investment which can save you from losing 30 years of data (even if the risk is very small).
My point was that something is much better than nothing, and you don't need 99.999% reliability in your setup to greatly reduce risk that you're exposing yourself to when keeping 30 years of data in only one place.
> But then, should you encrypt them in case of theft?
Depends on the nature of the data. I guess that most of that 30 years worth of data didn't need encryption, and copying only insensitive data is an option. On the other side, cloud account, or device logged in to the cloud account could be stolen too.
> Where to keep them in case of fire?
That's irrelevant if we're talking about backing up data stored on cloud service.
> What to do with "old" backups (can I trust the drive to live more than 2 years? 5 years?), copy them over to new drives? But what then with duplicated files?
Aside from some unlikely issues, yes, drives should last at least a couple of years. In the 5+ year timeframes I think you could just buy a new drive (bigger/cheaper/more reliable than the last as the technology improves). If we're talking about a lazy strategy of backing up the data once a year, even deleting everything on a drive and copying everything again isn't that bad. Better than nothing.
> I think having backups in the cloud is currently the best "backup and forget" strategy
But we're not talking about having the cloud as a backup. The issue here is having the files only in the cloud, with no backup. For a non-technical person, cloud as a backup is great, but here we have a case where a person had all their data only on the cloud, and then lost access to the cloud. If the cloud was only a backup (or a way to sync/access the data on other devices), but the data would still be present on some private device, there would be no problem.
And also, you do not need a rack of homelab gear to do backups. I have an AV rack (somewhat undermining my point I accept), 16U, bolted to my laundry wall. Within it is a network switch, my ISP's routing gear, my Phillips hue controller, and 3 PCs. One is a dedicated Minecraft box (shut up), one is my universal Ubuntu box for miscellaneous automations + plex, and one is a Windows 10 box that handles my DVR, file shares, and backups.
The actual backups themselves are scripts that run nightly and move data from the misc. PCs to the big one, along with some syncthing shares that do the same, and then the lot is backed up offsite with a backup vendor's application. I grant if you were setting this entire setup up from nothing, it would be a decent amount of work. However I also point out, this is all off the shelf batch files and OSS. This is hardly what I would call engineering, and that's by design, I wanted it to very simple.
So, big empathy, big understanding, I would give this dude a hug if I could. AND, people should take this as a lesson to not just shove all their shit into a monolith and call it a day because it's cheap and easy.
Drives are very cheap these days and it seems he had most of it local but went full cloud.