For sure natural disaster can take various forms, and even if we took several precautions in regards to our private keys, we might have had made mistakes, so for example, maybe in the LA fire example, we had some kind of a hardware wallet, and we had back up keys in our house and then another set of back up keys in another building on the property (if we are so lucky as to have another building available to us, such as a shed or a garage), but then if our backups are on paper, then they might have all gotten damaged.. and a similar thing can happen in a hurricane or tropical storm zone in which the kind of disaster is different, and potentially leave us vulnerable if our backups are not sufficiently geographically separated.
Some people do not even have access to any location other than their living location, which might not be a lot of places to store/hide backups, and surely the more value that we hold, the more important it becomes to spend more time and potentially money in protecting our value.
Surely with some of the burnt homes there might have been people storing a lot, if not all of their wealth in their houses, and so then if their house burned down, they would likely needed some kind of an insurance policy, since it could be difficult to self-insure.. and if a person had residential property and also had bitcoin, then maybe they ONLY lost half if they had secured the bitcoin properly, yet surely it is difficult to presume that everyone who might have had bitcoin in the fires had secured their bitcoin sufficiently (or maybe they got lucky and their backups did not end up getting destroyed... or maybe if they had notice before they evacuated, they were able to take their backups with them?)..
Surely there can be a lot of kinds of value besides the personal residence or the bitcoin, and also some folks put a lot of time and energy into building and organizing their personal (and perhaps work?) space, and so there could be a lot of loss in regards to various organization systems that a person might have established in their personal residence.... There could have had been value in having had built neighborhood relations too.
This was exactly what I was arguing or should I rather say discussing with a friend few days back, he argued that storing your seed phrase offline is the best and most secure method of seed storage, and while I agreed with him to an extent, I was still trying to remind him that offline storage is still not 100% secure as something could still go wrong and his storage option could be affected, using the LA fire outbreak as an example I was able to explain to him the dangers and limitations of offline storages too. Even when one chooses to use multiple backups, there’s still every possibility of damage or loss. For example, having backup phrases on paper and safely securing it in a place on your house may only guarantee some level of protection and safety to one’s assets as it is still very vulnerable in the face of fire, water or other natural disasters.
Indeed, geographical separation of the backup phrases may also be able to mitigate the risks totally losing everything but like we know, not everyone has access to different safe locations, which also makes it very difficult to access this alternative.
So that led us to the big question, since we can’t feel safe secure our backup phrases online due to fear of hackers and online theft, and neither can we feel completely safe securing our backup phrases offline for fear of losing them to thieves and natural disasters, where/what then is the safest place or method of storing our wallet data, where we can completely feel safe without having to worry about threats?