Is the Backup of a Node (and its contents) reqired?

[Alexey]

Unfortunately Storj do not have any benefit from failed nodes, the escrow is not enough to cover the cost of repair:

Design Draft: Storage Node Graceful Exit

We should make a Graceful exit feature available before the production. Otherwise it will costs money to Storj Labs. For example. SN started and somehow got 2TB of data for a month. Let’s assume that 25% of it downloaded back by the customer. The payout would accounted as 2*($1.5+$20*0.25)=$13. The 75% of it should be held, so held amount would be $9.75 If the SNO doesn’t like how it’s going and want to exit, they could request a Graceful exit (GE). Since it’s not implemented, it just shutdow…

The reason for suggestion to have one node per HDD is different - we want to have a lot of SNO, and it’s easy for most of users just setup a one storagenode per HDD.