ALL our data is stored at all times on one of two RAID devices. One has 4 hard drives and if one fails the other 3 still provide 100% of the data. The other RAID box has two hard drives and one mirrors the other so if one fails no data is lost.
We access these boxes using a wireless router and our working files are always on the RAID box. Only way to lose everything would be with a fire and that is why the second 2-disc mirror RAID is used to backup the primary one. The second one is kept with a neighbor.
Cloud storage is a fancy name for something that has been available for many years. Anyone with a free Gmail or Yahoo account has a gigabyte or more of free storage space on their servers. If nothing else backup key files like your wife's spreadsheet at the end of each working session. Even a $10 USB drive will hold 8 gigabytes of data or a thousand spreadsheets so no excuse for being careless.
I have been working with computers for the past 30 years and backing up data is something I always do in some way. Even with my working photo file I have two workstations (HP tower and Mac tower) that I use and both of them have mirrored data drives (separate from the boot drive) so I do not lose a minute of work if one of the drives fails.
The more valuable the data the more important it is to back it up frequently as a matter of course. Data recovery services charge $1500 or more and they do not guarantee what data they will be able to recover and you pay either way for them to try.
