The decision here was: For the given budget we have, where do we make the reliability vs data backed-up trade off? Increasing one necessarily decreases the other.
The options are:
- Increase reliability but decrease how much data capacity they have
- Increase data capacity at the cost of lower reliability
- Remove the "given the budget we have" constraint via fundraising. With more funding they can afford to increase both
You can see the decision they made for the fixed budget option. Now we can help them remove their constraint with extra donations (Every $5 helps. I've already donated)
Simply not true. Encoding schemes represent a whole different set of tradeoff possibilities which you don't seem to have considered, and simple replication is worse than other options in terms of both reliability and efficiency.
Basically yes. It's not quite same cost due to the CPU/memory issues I mentioned earlier, but it's the same cost for disk drives.
> Donations would be the best way to solve this problem
Donations don't solve this problem. The vulnerability to faults is part of the system design, independent of size.