Comment by travisby

For hardware failure, replication is the bees knees and indeed means you'll lose less (no? depending on your replication settings) data.

But, backups will help if you replicated _bad data_, or more accurately _data changes_.

You can restore from backup if you accidentally ran `DELETE FROM foo;`, where replication will not help!

(Insert cryptolocker type viruses, bugs, human query mistakes, etc).