You check if you backed up everything correctly, and if the process works by restoring the backup and confirming they work.

But you do you, in the end it's your neck on the line.

Are you.... just talking about stuff like pictures and videos and important documents? I mean, I would have thought the context was clear that that's not really what's being discussed. But if not, then sure, if you just have files backed up, then all you need to worry about is making sure you have enough copies of that as you need to not lose it.

Hmm. I'd better explain that.

Anywhere you have data that exists in one place, it is a matter of time before it dies. Who knows how long it'll be, but it will eventually die.

If you have data in two places, then when it dies in one of those places, as long as it also hasn't died in the other place, you have one copy and it will eventually die unless you replicate it somewhere else.

And many people find that when they go to read those burnded discs or read that backup external drive - oops, it's damaged or dead. And then that data is gone.

So for unimportant things, a single backup somewhere is probably fine. But is that backup in your house with your computer that it's also on? If your house burns, those two places are gone and your data is gone. Is that worth the tiny risk? Up to you. You know how much yo ucare about your data.

If you really want to make sure something valuable like important documents and family pictures, then ideally you want at least one copy offsite. If it's important, it's no bad thing to have two copies of it offsite along with perhaps one backup locally so it's convenient. While you don't need ten copies of data, it's surprising how quickly 1-2 copies can go bad at the same time, or one goes bad and you don't replace it and another goes bad and.... quickly you run the risk of data loss.

For a home user who doesn’t want to lose their files,

That's not the topic at hand, which one might've been able to tell from context clues.

two local backups and a cloud one.

That is a pretty good minimal setup. Not disparaging, that's better than probably 95% if not more like 99% of people do.

Just give me anxiety?

No, you're the one in a conversation that's really not about your type of situation.

We're talking about businesses who have servers - internet servers, internal servers. These run software. They have databases with largre amounts of data. They have programs that have lots of settings, configured in various ways. Servers set up to run services on the LAN and/or WAN and/or across the internet.

On your home computer, you can reinstall Windows, install Office, install Adobe, all the other software you use. And you can take the annoying time to re-customize everything to get it set up to your liking. Then copy all your documents over. You won't have everything ready-to-go unless you use a fancy backup and restore method (that starts to touch on the subject being discussed here - that restore is not guaranteed unless you've tested it. It's amazing how often that goes wrong), but it's okay, you have time.

In a corporate environment, if something breaks and you need to restore that data and software, you need it up and running ASAP.

Now, you'd think it would be as simple as getting the hardware, installing the OS, installing the software, and restoring the data - but that's not necessarily the case. Not the same version of the software? Data formatting might've changed. Settings might've changed. Does every version of everything work together? Underlying pieces f the system are different? Might cause things to break.

I won't get into the technical details beyond that, but the point is that we're not talking about just some pics and docs.

So that's th egenesis of the misunderstandings here. It's a wholly different topic than what you're dealing with.

But yeah, for you, you've got a good backup system going. I personally have two different cloud providers for the data I want to keep the most, but that's not all the pics and such, just for a subset of it.