Do you rely on RAID as your NAS backup?

As has been pointed out above, RAID is good for some things but not a complete disaster recovery solution.  I definitely agree with @almarg (not unusual) about the time to recover your backed-up data from the cloud.  RAID (not RAID 0) is good for recovery from things that don't cause you to lose the whole array.  It's not going to help you in case of fire, theft, tornadoes, etc.

A few years back I ran across an article from a company called Backblaze that offers cloud storage services.  Because they purchase large numbers of drives, know when they put them in service and (obviously) know when they fail, they are in a good position to comment on the reliability of different brands and sizes.  In the article I read, they commented on a high failure rate among 3 TB drives.  Because of that I have steered away from buying that size drive.  That's probably too general but your data is valuable even if it can be replaced so I don't take the chance.  If you're interested you can do an internet search on "backblaze hard drive reliability" and find plenty of references.  The most recent one I saw after a short search is here.

Dick

I use a western digital raid enabled NAS for all my digital music. It is in turn is backed up incrementally to the cloud via Crashplan, which offers unlimited backup, no-throttle, backups. Crashplan will also deliver via overnight delivery physical drives to you in the event that you need a full restore (i haven't needed that yet). Very happy with it and have been using it for around three years. western digital drives, in my experience, are very reliable.

no affiliation with either company. 

tortilladc, I also use Crashplan for my cloud-based backups, and highly recommend it.  I run all major operating systems (Linux, Mac, and Windows) in my house and Crashplan backs them all up.  The amount of data is around 4TB total backed up so far.  So it's good that Crashplan has unlimited storage for a fixed price.  Yes, it took a month to fully upload the data, but once that was done, it's been smooth sailing.  Crashplan can also backup to other computers on your local network (or even your friends' computers somewhere else, but this would require that the data travel over the Internet, where you likely have a slower connection).

And yes, they can ship hard drives with the full data in case of a need for full data recovery.

Ozzy, RAID is a system of stringing multiple hard drives together to get extra storage and/or redundancy (so if a hard drive fails you're OK).  There are different configurations of RAID (called levels); each RAID level has a different scheme for distributing the main data and redundant data.  Most of these can tolerate a single hard drive failure, and keep the system up and running without data loss or downtime.  That allows for replacing that failed drive and having the system rebuild the information that was on the old (failed) drive onto the new one.  RAID 6 will even tolerate two drives failing.  So if you're running a mission-critical system, such as processing thousands of financial transactions every second, then you need RAID to provide the assurance that your system won't crash with the loss of a hard drive.  For local audio storage, however, RAID is likely overkill unless your data exceeds that of the size of drives currently available (typically around 4-6TB), in which case you could take advantage of RAID to spread all that data across multiple drives seamlessly.  The audio storage local backup solution can be easily managed by built-in tools like Time Machine (Macintosh).  Then you'll need a cloud-based backup on top of that to handle such situations like a house fire, weather catastrophe, or theft.

Hope that helps.

Michael

Again, RAID is not a backup.  It can be destroyed by controller failure, virus, voltage spike, bug in OS or controller software etc.    If you use Crashplan you can use it with single drive as well.  Crashplan is your backup - not RAID.
In addition, as Al mentioned, recovery can take forever.  Also, companies have system problems, go out of business, change rules etc.  I would rather trust my plain backup drive.  Unpowered drives in storage tend not to fail.  In addition simple solutions are always the best  - read this link:

http://jeffreydonenfeld.com/blog/2011/12/crashplan-online-backup-lost-my-entire-backup-archive/

One other strike against RAID - you need to use "server grade" drives which are more expensive - the more affordable drives on the market will fail much quicker in a RAID configured NAS drive.

The company that I’ve purchased all my computers from over the past 30 years (and now good friends) recommends to all their customers contemplating RAID of any type to use server grade drive ONLY. They seen far to many standard drives fail within 12 months.

Having said that - I use a NAS drive configured as mirrored RAID to provide protection against hard disk failure of my music library. It works well, is really simple to recover (just pop in a new drive) and is extremely stable. I keep it in the basement where it is nice and cool, which it appreciates.

I first tried the NAS drive using a couple of standard drives (from a couple of redundant and hardly used USB drives) just to see how a serving music from a NAS drive would perform - perhaps thinking that the case for server grade drives had been "overstated"? - RESULT: one drive failed within 6 months. I replaced both drives with server grade drives and 4 years later - still not missing a beat :-)

Convenience, is perhaps the biggest selling point of RAID. If a drive fails there is minimal down-time - unless both drives fail (always a possibility, but quite rare according to my computer buddies)

Server grade drives are more robust and fail with much less frequency - since they are built to handle far more transfers that what is required from serving up music in a home environment.

I agree with other posters...
- RAID is NOT a backup!
- it may have some other "warts", but I have yet to experience them - perhaps due to my network configuration

BTW - I use a Dlink NAS drive - configured with two server grade drives - cost me around $450 - jeepers - I’ve got cables that cost more than that !!!

"Perfect Solution" maybe not - but it sure does reduce the need of having to restore from a backup - at least so far :-)

Regards...