Do you rely on RAID as your NAS backup?

RAID is NOT a backup. RAID protects against hard drive failures. That's all.

RAID (except RAID 1) also allows ganging multiple drives together for extra storage space, so that's another potential benefit, and maybe faster read times.  Most consumer-grade NAS's, however, will be more limited by network speed than drive speed. But to protect the data, I recommend both local and cloud-based backup systems (preferably automated). 

Michael

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