One of the dangerous factors of cloud-first thinking is that it tends to abstract away people's concerns for redundancy. "Oh, CloudBrand handles distributed ba

One of the dangerous factors of cloud-first thinking is that it tends to abstract away people's concerns for redundancy. "Oh, CloudBrand handles distributed backups for me in 32 different regions, I checked the box for that." And when CloudBrand has some new scale of failure, it just takes down all your copies at once. Every service is "extremely high reliability" until it isn't. Sometimes, the causes of failure are even beyond technical ones. Look at the situation with Adobe Creative Cloud users in Venezuela-- the discs and wires are still fine, but customers are losing real value because of legal mandates. Your high availability platform can withstand a network cable cut, but can it withstand a court order? If you're still thinking local first, it encourages awareness of multiple baskets. iCloud is down? You can still pull the photos off your camera's flash card, or your workstation's SSD, or the external spinning-rust hard disc you used for cold backups, or the third-party dedicated backups service you use...