> apart from the fact that my house could catch fire
Your house feels like a fortress, until something happens to you or someone you know. Not just a natural disaster, like a hurricane, tornado, flood, or earthquake, but small disasters too. House fire, as you mentioned, or having your house burgled, some crazy power company glitch, or something as mundane as a child with a cup of water in exactly the wrong place. Even if you are meticulous enough to drive backups off-site backups, that somewhere is probably close enough that it's possible for a natural disaster to take out your house and your backup site. Encrypt your data and save it somewhere geographically far away, if it's really important to you. It's doable manually but for everybody else, imo, an online service (eg Dropbox or Google Drive) is easier, which means it's more likely to happen and not fall off the bottom of the Todo list.
I do prefer having local copies of everything, because I don't trust The Cloud. Malicious actors can get your account shut down, and then all your stuff is gone, locked up and the key thrown away.
My solution has been to run a RAID 1 NAS device for all my local stuff (including all my media I want to stream in the house - nice having movies and TV when internet is down). 4TB drives, rated for NAS usage.
Important documents, and sentimental photos (many GB's worth from the last few decades) I periodically back up onto an external SSD and put in my fire safe with physical documents of importance.
FYI, fire safes aren’t necessarily waterproof. They’ll protect your documents from the fire but not the firefighters’ water, or the drop through the burned out floor to the basement. Mine, for example, requires an additional treatment to be waterproof. Something to keep in mind if you haven’t already.
(I keep my backups in three places: local drives, safe deposit box rotated quarterly, and BackBlaze. I’ve only ever needed the first, but I feel safer knowing I have the other two.)
Your house feels like a fortress, until something happens to you or someone you know. Not just a natural disaster, like a hurricane, tornado, flood, or earthquake, but small disasters too. House fire, as you mentioned, or having your house burgled, some crazy power company glitch, or something as mundane as a child with a cup of water in exactly the wrong place. Even if you are meticulous enough to drive backups off-site backups, that somewhere is probably close enough that it's possible for a natural disaster to take out your house and your backup site. Encrypt your data and save it somewhere geographically far away, if it's really important to you. It's doable manually but for everybody else, imo, an online service (eg Dropbox or Google Drive) is easier, which means it's more likely to happen and not fall off the bottom of the Todo list.