[ChrisDutrow]

I'm not sure spinning hard drives are more reliable outside of data centers - at least not for laptops because you are carrying them around (anecdotaly, I recently had en employee break a hard drive in a laptop after dropping it).

It probably doesn't really matter as much as your intuition might suggest anyway because each drive can and will fail. And they fail at similar rates (as opposed to an exponential difference of a factor of 10x or more). So you need to take similar precautions for each type of drive.

For personal use - I use exclusively SSDs because they are much faster. The I put all the information I don't want to lose in dropbox.

For servers, all data that is important goes in a database cluster (Cassandra) with a replication factor of 3. Those drives are backed up daily offsite. For data that cannot be lost at all (even a days worth), I also copy each record to Amazon S3 every time it is changed. - I'm sure there are many other ways to tackle this problem.

[ladzoppelin]

"The I put all the information I don't want to lose in dropbox." I don't think its healthy to consider cloud storage backup. For example I am pretty sure you could loose everything to Ransomware.

[lwf]

In re the Ransomware point, Dropbox provides all users with access to snapshots of their files going back 30 days:

https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/11

So, as long as you notice before the clock runs out, you should be able to recover from ransomware via file history.

[I work for Dropbox, but am not speaking on behalf of my employer.]

[ValentineC]

I know Dropbox sells Extended Version History [1] as an add-on, but it'll be awfully nice if Pro users had maybe 60 days of file history, versus 30 days for free. Just a thought.

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/113