NAS vs RAID Box vs External Drives vs Cloud Storage

[Kal Rubinson]

36 minutes ago, unbalanced output said:

Of course there are bigger, professional Nas out there, but at this level backup becomes a real concern - would you duplicate all with reel tape? A second NAS? That gets real expensive real quick!

Yes but I use the second NAS at another location so that it provides a needed service in addition to backing up the original (or is it the other way around?).

[Kal Rubinson]

5 minutes ago, foodfiend said:

@agladstone Personally, I would stick to RAID, since it increases the security of your music data slightly by having some form of parity (not RAID 0, obviously). As for a back-up solution, you can look at backing-up to another NAS, or to the cloud. Like what unbalanced output mentioned, RAID is not a back-up solution. Many new NAS users get mistaken that the RAID negates the need for back-up and get badly burnt when their array fails!

Yes, RAID is a convenience.  I recently had a transient drive failure due to excess heat and I was able to recover the content with little effort.  Had two drives failed, I would have needed the backup.

[Kal Rubinson]

1 hour ago, foodfiend said:

Well, while not full-proof, RAID in a NAS can be configured according to the level of paranoia one has... RAID 6 can survive a double drive failure...

Indeed.  You can draw the line where it makes you comfortable.

[Kal Rubinson]

On 8/12/2017 at 8:20 PM, foodfiend said:

Well, while not full-proof, RAID in a NAS can be configured according to the level of paranoia one has... RAID 6 can survive a double drive failure...

I know but one has to draw the line somewhere and I do have another redundant NAS plus a HDD backup.

 

Redundant, as in this post.