[glitchcrab]

Sure, but then you're putting all your eggs in one basket (hard drive). If you really want to divest yourself of the cloud then you need to set things up in a redundant and fault-tolerant fashion. And at that point the outlay is much more than 'just a hard drive'.

[Dylan16807]

Did you skip the "back a million photos" part? That's at least 3 copies of every file, spread across your group. If you want maximum safety you can add a local backup too, which isn't much more money. You don't need to spend anything on fault tolerance. Your files should already be on multiple servers, but also if it goes down for a few days that isn't a big deal.

[hinkley]

That was already covered in my top level comment though. Geographic redundancy not local mirroring.

[raddan]

Yes, you need two hard drives. If you’re really paranoid, use three.