And how do you guarantee the validity of your snap shot? has your process been writing corrupt records for the last n hours and not notice? Do you even have ac

And how do you guarantee the validity of your snap shot? has your process been writing corrupt records for the last n hours and not notice? Do you even have access to that snapshot if the system is down? the cloud simply exchanges know levels of failure with unknown level of failure. You pay someone else to think about it for you. If there is a massive data loss at amazon, and people have been backing up to glacier, the recovery times will jump from hours to days even weeks, simply because there aren't enough drives to recover from. The cloud may be more reliable, but when it goes down, it'll gown down hard, leaving you high and dry if you don't have real backups.