[throwaway81523]

Erasure codes with lots of redundant drives is how online.net's C14 storage product works, but it is much more hassle than ordinary replication, since retrieval requires reading data from a lot of different drives to reassemble the shares, and similarly for splitting storage requests into shares and recording them. C14 is a Glacier-like product where you request a retrieval and your data is restore as an S3 object sometime (up to hours) later. That makes it easier, I expect.

I agree that this would be good as a last-ditch backup for stuff like Hetzner cloud snapshots, but the primary storage for those snapshots probably has to be ordinary RAID.

Fwiw I have a bunch of data in Hetzner Storagebox and have gotten several notices in the past few months that Storagebox would be temporarily offline for maintenance, which I assume meant raid rebuilds and/or drive swaps. The most recent of these was an "urgent" maintenance with less notice time than usual. It hasn't caused me any inconvenience, but I wonder if they have suffered a spate of drive failures recently.