It doesn't take a meteor. I got hit when EV1 had a fire in one of their DCs, fortunately we had a local backup from which we restored and kept on running but a lot of companies were not in that position and had a hard time surviving. EV1 was hurt badly by this, it's not just meteors. What happened was that a transformer on the floor exploded, took a dividing wall with it and cause a (surprisingly!) relatively minor fire.
What took down the DC for several weeks was the firedepartements investigation. They took their time to figure out the root cause of the fire which is their right but the collateral damage of that was substantial.
The nice thing from backblaze's perspective and their customers is that downtime is far more tolerable than it would be for most businesses. Most disasters that are going to impact a data center aren't going to destroy the physical hard drives, assuming the data center has the usual safeguards in place.
Brian from Backblaze here-> this is definitely true. If you ask to have a 5 TByte restore prepared, it will take us a full 22 hours to get that all assembled for you. If you want us to FedEx the prepared restore on a USB hard drive, it will take ANOTHER 24 hours, and if you are in Europe it's more like 48 hours.
And what's luxurious about "backup" as a business is this doesn't bother many customers. As long as we keep communicating to them on the progress, and we assure them they are going to get every solitary bit/byte/jpeg/mp3/movie back - they often tell us to take our time and do it right. For "backup" accurate and durable is about a thousand times more important than "instant gratification".
What took down the DC for several weeks was the firedepartements investigation. They took their time to figure out the root cause of the fire which is their right but the collateral damage of that was substantial.
So don't just plan for meteors.