Luckily, my ISP never seems to enforce the data limits. Just the occasional reminder I've exceed the limit by about 3 times.

I have two 3TB WD Passports. They're pretty small.

I started backing up about 3 years ago and, since then, I have had 3 occasions where I have needed the backups. 2 self inflicted! The verification angle is interesting though. Maybe generate checksums of both disks and compare? That seems like a project I should be embarking on.

After starting to backup my data I got a bit more confident with rsync and cron and I started to backup the home directories of various computers including a couple of Raspberry Pis. I do a clean install of Fedora every 6 months on my main desktop so the ability to simply restore my current settings is a huge benefit - eg. scripts are always backed up but cron can be only listed before I do the new install (maybe I need to think about that also).

A thought provoking discussion.

You can rent a safe deposit box for under $50/year, depending on size. 3 HDDs should fit in the smallest box they have. The vault in any reasonable bank will be fire and water proof, as well as mostly burglarproof, and the bank can't open your box without your key. That's about as safe a place as you can find, while still keeping them relatively easy to recover. 6 terabytes is a lot of data. It's not really that expensive online, though. I have a terabyte of storage on Google Drive that's free, for buying a chromebox. A terabyte on Google Drive is $10/month, so you would have to pay $60/month. As noted, the time to upload that would be very long, and would probably exceed what your ISP would allow unless you did it slowly over several months. If the data is important to you, it's probably worth paying for more HDDs and storing them in a bank vault.

I think those would fit in the small US deposit boxes (around $32 per year with a deposit account). The dimensions I found were 4.33 x 3.21 x 0.92 inches. As I recall, my box was right at 4 inches wide, 2 inches high, and 19 inches deep. So I think these would fit.

You can always take one to a bank to verify before renting one.

BTW, the bank CAN get into the deposit box - but with a bit of difficulty as the customer key lock has to be drilled out.

I'll look into the deposit box idea. The HDDs are encrypted, so if someone manages to somehow steal them, they won't get any of the data.

My upload speed in only 10Mbp/s. Probably never reach my 200GB data cap in a month lol. I'm still not 100% comfortable having my data in "the cloud" either, even encrypted.

I am as enthusiastic about safe deposit boxes as I am about putting it in a "free-forever cloud storage" location. You have much less assurance of physical access than you probably think, and it is not true that banks cannot open them - they can and do. Google away for recent safe deposit box loss, seizure, "forfeiture", etc., etc. cases... I closed my own several years ago and bury my important stuff in the back yard! (metaphorically, but I sleep better at night.)

For your personal data, you really don't have to be too creative to find a "safe enough" (define that for yourself) location where you are more assured of physical access under any forseeable circumstance, and probably little or no cost.

For the case at hand, 6TB of data that appears to not be frequently updated... just ask, now where could I safely stash a drive and change it out every few months...? I bet you could think of a few options, even if they inolved an occasional FedEx exchange or weekend visit to a friend or relative.

I also do not like public cloud offerings, but I do make use of a VPS or two for well controlled online storage with on-demand access. This has the advantage of scriptable updates over SSH tunnel, SFTP, rsync, encryption of your choice - all your common tools. Lock it down, do not put a web or email server on it, just give some thought to how you want it to work. Better than a safe deposit box and comparable expense into the hundreds of gigabytes range at least (no, let's do an exhaustive cost comparison at this point).

I'd trust the bank before I'd trust the cloud.

I had seen somewhere, there is supposedly a way to hide your data in the 'deep web'.

Yes, of course the bank can open the box, by drilling, but it's obvious after it's done. They have to be able to get into boxes if the renter dies, loses the key, doesn't pay, etc, but it's not a secret when they do. I'd trust the bank before I'd trust my mattress, or the trunk of my car, or almost anything else. Nothing is perfect, but you really need a safe place for backups if the data is valuable, and your house is not a safe place.

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