If I lose power I can have a home generator running. These are incredibly common where I am due to hurricane outages - you’ll hear sometimes multiple on a single block powering whole homes.

S3 goes down, your entire data infrastructure (and systems attached to it) is out of reach. Local backups that can be deployed and run like S3 as if your services are still up, unless I’m mistaken, aren’t very common and would mean doing the thing you got S3 to handle in the first place. A generator is much easier to set up and use to solve the problem in a 1:1 way comparatively with zero dependence on local utilities and click on almost quite literally the second you lose power. Yeah they can’t run forever and aren’t the most cost efficient, but people use them weeks and have 100% function of all electronics in their home again.

I am not responsible for building and deploying these systems, I just depend on some of them at my job and interact with S3/media convert a ton. My understanding has always been that backups that can be restored very quickly are the aim, not trying to keep all the things attached to S3 running as if it’s still going. But if I am wrong please let me know and I would love to hear more from folks about this! I actually find this whole dance very interesting