Boyz, many years ago I worked for a newspaper. I was System Manager and Pre-Press; i ran all the computers, and in particular I ran the computers which talked to the imagesetter and the platemaker, and so created the film which was burned to plates which were hung on the press. In other words, without Pre-Press there ain't no paper. The imagesetter and platemaker were NOT on the main network; film for the imagesetter was $3/foot (100-foot film canisters, $300/canister) and we did NOT want some bozo in Editorial 'accidentally' sending something to film. We had a server, running A/UX (yeah, it was that long ago) and we had two primitive RAID arrays attached to it externally by SCSI and a DAT tape drive, also on the SCSI chain. And a SyQuest drive, on the SCSI chain, later replaced by a Zip and then a Jaz drive. Why? Because Editorial and Advertising and so on accessed files on the server, which were stored on the RAID arrays, and backed up on DAT tape... and when we needed to send files to file, we would copy the completed files onto a SyPest disk, later onto a Zip or a Jaz disk because everyone hated SyPest with the fury of 10,000 suns, and hand-walk it to the pre-press setup. This meant that we had three copies of all files in use: on the RAID (with an archive, compressed, so that's four copies), on tape, and on various SyPest, Zip, or Jaz disks. We had a fire-resistant file cabinet with tapes and SyPest, Zip, and Jaz disks, plus we sent older tapes/disks out to a 3rd party, so if there was a fire the older stuff would be safe. Literally the only things which would not be stored in multiple copies some of them offline would be the files being worked on that day. Everything else was backed up, including applications and system software. Doing a complete rebuild of the system from go would have been a matter of hours of effort, bringing up essential items and current work, followed by slowly restoring all the files on the RAIDs. Very important stuff was burned to CDs or DVDs and stored elsewhere, so that's five copies.
I could do this 30 bloody years ago, well before there was such a thing as ransomware; I was thinking of fires, or floods, or theft. There was no cloud; when I started, there was one, just one, modem, running at 33.6 kb/s, replaced by two, just two, running at 56 kb/s, and finally by 500 kb/s 'broadband' to the network. What's these boyz problem why they don't have multiple copies and why they didn't go actively looking for malware or stick their stuff on something unlikely to attract malware, such as BSD? (How much ransomware is available for BSD, anyway?)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
