[antonovka2]

To put it another way: the only reason to maintain your own backups of your site data -- aside from healthy paranoia -- is because you expect your service provider to fail at doing their job. And if that's the case, shouldn't you be finding a service provider that does it better?

If you don't expect your service provider to fail, you don't know anything about service providers.

Everybody fails.

Our colocation facility has redundant generator systems. They're tested regularly, and have handled failures previously. Yet, when the power went out, three of the backup generators failed, and our site (as well as Craigslist, Yelp, and others) was out for 45 minutes.

The cause? A bug in the backup generator's software: http://365main.com/status_update.html

Shit happens. Sometimes it's not your fault. You still need to prepare for it.