No, you're absolutely right. And I didn't state they are, nor that they are free. For backup purposes, I use my NAS, an external hard drive that I use off site, and Amazon Glacier for when things go really bad. (With Glacier, you pay mere pennies for storing gigabytes, but you pay a lot if you ever need the files).

What I meant is that the author is so focused on privacy issues that he/she forgets about redundancy.