An external drive or a USB stick is just as prone to failure like a Mechanical Hard Drive.
Things get much worse if you're dealing with a solid state drive, because these tend to fail without any prior warnings whatsoever.
A cloud storage is a more robust solution, but seeing where Razor's from, I don't think that's a viable solution for him either. Telkom charges a limb or two for unlimited bandwidth, if I recall correctly.
Pity Razor lives too far from me. Recovering data off of dead hard drives is just a matter of few hours for me.
Granted, if I can manage a donor drive that matches the model that failed on him.