If the data is valuable then one should have an off-site backup anyway. I use an old laptop pretty much in the same way that the author uses his Pi's. While it

If the data is valuable then one should have an off-site backup anyway. I use an old laptop pretty much in the same way that the author uses his Pi's. While it's fairly new SSD is much more reliable than the Pi's SD card I would never store anything important on it unless I'm certain it's backed up somewhere else as well.