How To Mitigate Catastrophic Hardware Failure As Host?

[rivercityjon]

After losing the hard drive that was my main Sia drive and losing all my collateral... I'm wondering if the same seed can be installed on multiple drives as sort of a cloud hosting solution, so if one drive fails, the other acts as a backup?

Of course, I will probably never have a failure of a Sia drive ever again, but an interesting question nonetheless.

[in-cred-u-lous]

I think that Sia present a different scenario with regards to data loss: Unlike protecting yourself from catastrophic data loss where loosing the data itself is what needs to be avoided, you are in the case of Sia hosting erasure encoded data that is already secured against loss by being distributed across a large number of hosts. So, as a host you don't need to worry about data loss, only loss of income. If you loose data you of course also loose income. But, reducing the probability of data loss to ~zero comes at additional cost too, which cuts into your profit. So, you need to weigh the options of loosing data and income vs securing data at higher cost against each other.

In the end, I think there are several scenarios in which simply loosing the data, your storage fees and collateral might still be cheaper than insuring the hosted data against loss. The option you suggest, data duplication, is one option which I think will be more expensive than loosing your potential income. There are cheaper ways to protect data, using RAID for instance. Whether it is cheaper than loosing data in case of (improbable) data loss is something you need to calculate based on local conditions (hardware costs, electricity costs, taxes etc etc).