I haven’t thought this one through but I think it’s an interesting thought: if your one of your brand new 18TB drives suddenly blows up… 
That’s a hell of a lot of plots to lose and have to replot.
Is there any sense in backing up drives, and if everyone starts doing that, how much will the hard drive prices start to rise again? 
But seriously, is it worth thinking about backups? Are we all going to have to find tape drives for “cold storage” of our plots?
Backups would be a waste. Instead of using up disks for backup that space would be put to better use for more plots. More plots the better.
You’re just wasting space with backups. Each plot has the same value. More plots means more potential value extracted. Backup of plots is just redundancy that costs space and makes you nothing.
Offsite cloud backup would be awful too because downloading terabytes of data would be a nightmare.
Tape might actually work if you run a big enough operation to offset the cost of a high-end tape drive, being the only storage technology with lower $/TB than HDDs (but unusable for farming).
But then you’d have to factor in the time cost of getting your plots on the tapes, both in terms of labor (unless you spring for a tape robot - have fun paying that off) and possibly data transfer resources.
Consensus from long ago is that backing up plots is a waste of space that could be used for farming 
This is why NAS’es get incredible side-eye because they’re all about adding durability and adding reliability and Chia doesn’t care about ANY of that…
Also I would call it farming drives. You farm. Your choice on topic title edit, but I feel strongly that farming is more correct.
Oh I didn’t even think of remote! According to a calculator, 47 hours for 18TiB on a gigabit connection, let’s make it 60 hours: 2½ days. While I can’t plot that much in that little time, the speeds I’m getting would make it worth it (apologies, I know we have it real good here in Europe).
But then, again, we get to: if you’re storing it remote, then just farm it there.
So true! I think mostly the question is: how scared should we be that our “spinning rust” starts failing. From reading in the past few weeks it seems that drives are really very durable and the chance of them failing is a more than acceptable risk in the grand scheme of a farm.
Yep, but I think tape drive seek time might exceed 30 seconds… 
Ah yes, I had to refer to the related topic to brush up again, I wrote farming at first and then doubted myself and changed it.
Yeah harvesting is what happens when you prove, farming is the process of the files sitting there waiting to be harvested and chosen by the proof checker… that’s the way I think about it.
I think over time plotting is gonna be optimized twelve ways to sunday and plots will be generated super fast. Storage will be the limiting factor. I’m quite confident in saying this.
(Also, there is a “rich get richer” aspect to this; if you can generate a massive farm pool, keep doing it as long as possible and keep growing farm space, you can win forever. But you can’t let up – you can never stop growing your farm space and number of plots… not even for one second… every day you must be buying new drives and growing your farm plot space 
)
Yeah, I’m small time about 1 reward a day average until this week already seeing exponential decay in rewards with netspace growth. Ill plot what I have as long as the disks spin, but probably will save money for the Chia Networks IPO rather than new storage and plotters.
Spend my time instead building dumb chialisp toys. Get people to pay me XCH instead of farm it!
And you need to be continually lucky. No backups means that eventually you will have a catastrophic failure. A massive weather event that takes out 50%+ of your plots will mean you will never regain the position you once had.
Nobody is lucky forever.
How many plots do you have that it nets you a reward a day?
Chiacalculator.com wink.
Clearly not enough anymore. sigh. The poisson is over 70% for me to win nothing today.
Back up the mnemonic you used to configure your wallet. Every other part of Chia is disposable.