[ashray]

The author said that the primary hard disk failed and the host had told him there was a backup hard disk that hummed along for a year.

I cannot imagine any other practical situation in which a 'backup hard disk' would automatically kick in - apart from a RAID setup.

I know that budget hosts do not backup data off site, but they do tend to maintain their hardware, RAID arrays, etc.

However, I admit that I am all too unfamiliar with shared hosting environments in today's day and age, it's either a cloud or dedicated server for me - and for my budget dedicated servers, hosts have been pretty proactive about replacing bad hard drives.