One day, all of this will be gone. The sun will swell up, consume the inner planets, and burn everything to a crisp. Luckily, all life on Earth and everything humanity has created on this planet will be dust for millions of years before that happens—so that’s a bullet dodged!

I hate to depress you on such a nice day, but entropy is inevitable. And that counts for your backup strategies too. All backup strategies fail eventually. So, the goal isn’t to aim for the impossible, but to plan for reality.

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## The Myth of the “Perfect” Backup

You might feel that you’re following the perfect backup strategy, such as the hallowed “3-2-1” approach—where you have multiple copies on multiple media in multiple physical locations. However, no plan survives contact with the enemy. And the enemy here is Murphy’s Law.

In other words, you’re sleeping well at night because you think your backup strategy is bulletproof—until it’s actually put to the test. All you’re really doing is reducing the probability that you won’t lose your data.

Drives die. Cloud systems fail. NAS arrays can become corrupted. Sometimes your “redundancies” end up being the same mistake repeated a few times. No matter what, entropy or human complacency will get that data in the end.

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## Hardware Doesn’t Care About Your Data

Every form of data storage has an expiration date. So far, the best way to store data over long periods seems to be clay tablets or carving them into rock. Even then, you need some luck with weather and erosion.

“Hot” storage—like running drives—fail from usage. A mechanical drive might have a Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF) of over a million hours, but it could fail a few days out of the box or never fail during its useful lifespan.

SSDs wear out from being written to. Optical discs pressed at a factory can suffer from disc rot. The dyes in burned discs are lucky if they survive ten years. Magnetic tape is one of the best long-term formats, but it can degrade, or you simply may have no way to read it down the line.

SSDs and hard drives used for “cold” storage can fail without being powered on. The hard drive’s lubricant and rubber components may degrade and fail. Flash memory can suffer from “bit rot” as the electric charge leaks from memory cells over many years without power.

Age will kill all media in the long term, but a power surge or a virus can take out your data right now.

The only way redundancies help is if they’re truly independent of all your other backups—which, for most home backups, isn’t the case.

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## The Cloud Isn’t a Failsafe—It’s Someone Else’s Computer

Cloud storage may have given us a false sense of security. Yes, cloud storage providers follow industry-standard data storage practices to make it unlikely that your data will be lost.

However, we’ve all experienced major cloud service outages over the past few years, like the 2025 Amazon Web Services outage that took down a significant percentage of the web’s most popular services.

When an outage like that happens, you must reckon both with how much of your stuff you suddenly can’t access and with the reality that those servers may never come back online.

Often, the cause is simple human error or malicious actors—but sometimes it’s just bad luck.

On top of that, in the long run, the service could go under financially, or you might miss a few payments. Either way, it’s not really your backup of the data, is it?

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## The Human Factor Breaks Everything

We weak, fleshy humans are a common reason backup strategies fail—whether in the cloud or at home.

Did you test and verify your media and files? Did you set up a schedule and then check if it was done? What about simply mislabeling stuff?

There’s no automation that can make up for our mistakes or lack of due diligence.

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## The Only Winning Move Is Constant Paranoia

The best backup strategy includes a healthy dose of paranoia and a realistic goal for how long that data must be protected.

Do you need it safe for five years? Ten? The rest of your life? The rest of your children’s lives?

These questions lead to very different backup practices and choices.

While it’s a stressful way to live, if you have truly irreplaceable and important information, you need to put in proportional levels of effort.

That means true redundancy, periodic migration to fresh media, and frequent verification that your data is still intact.

Every backup strategy will fail—your job is to make sure it doesn’t fail all at once.
https://www.howtogeek.com/why-every-backup-strategy-is-doomed-to-fail/