Do you rely on RAID as your NAS backup?


It seems that using RAID architecture in your NAS is not the best backup strategy for various reasons.
Why even bother with RAID if that is the case?  Just use a single HD NAS and back it up periodically to another HD or the cloud.
Am I missing something?
albireo13
I use a Synology DS2125j with 2 WD 3GB Red drives as the primary drive for music and TimeMachine for my iMac. I don't keep the music file set on the iMac where I have a large file set of photographs. Had a very capable 5 year old ReadyNAS but swapped it out and enjoy the same fast performance and features but with a more intuitive interface. The configuration is their SHR - effectively RAID 1- a simple sync between the 2 drives. The Synology is wired to the router with my iMac which I use to download and rip music. Following this I use ChronoSync wirelessly to update my mac mini which hosts the music for my system. I also have 2 WD 1TB Passports, 1 for each computer,  which I configure as 'bootable' and update every 2 weeks for offsite storage (a friend's house) 'cause, as safestanil mentioned above, RAID is not failsafe. So effectively I have the original rips on the Synology with a hot copy, a copy on the mac mini and an off site copy.  It's rather a belt and suspenders arrangement but for around $500.00 will provide back-up for almost any local disaster. There are tempting cloud solutions and I may consider them but discovered that uploading large file sets can be verrrrrrrrry long - days, or months if it's the initial upload. And to perform an entire restore usually requires the provider send an expensive hard disk. 
Speed is not an issue in either importing new music or synchronizing between the 2 macs (other than the original load to the mac mini of 800 albums). Kept the hard copies and hope to never have to re-rip them again. 
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