Equipment

I'm getting ready to buy a SanDisk Professional G-Raid Shuttle. Do any of you use one? If so, what are your thoughts about it? Any thoughts as to what might be the most reliable Raid for backup?

Which raid version 24, 48, 72, or 96 TBytes? How much data do you have?

First raid alone is not backup. Raid can fail. At my former work, I was running 16 raid arrays, backed up to another 16 raid arrays in a different building. A couple of times a fan failed, always on a Friday night and the arrays cooked for 2 days, destroying the array. Another time a controller with 8 raid arrays failed and started writing random bytes in random locations, destroying the data on all 8 arrays! Fortunately, in each case, data were restored from backup.

Backup should be to at least 3 copies on 3 different backups. Preferable including at least one different media (especially for important things), and at least one set kept off site. The off site should be far enough to make catastrophic failures (like the LA wildfires) a low probability. One backup off site also ensures against robbery, flood, or fire. Best also to have backups with full disc encryption. Backup disks (including raid arrays) that are online are susceptible to electrical surges, including lightning that can wipe out the disks.

Mirrored disks mean if you accidentally delete a file, it can disappear from the mirror too.

Now days, I do not run any raid arrays, and I have more data than the above systems with the failures. I use USB disks. These days 20 terabyte disks are quite low in cost. Between my photography and my work, I have 10 disks to back up, many of them 20 terabyte disks. I have 3 sets of USB disks of the same capacity, and backup as things change, but they are kept offline until needed (to ensure against electrical surges or controller failures). Some disks are mostly static data so do not need attaching and running backup too often. I also have old machines converted to backup servers. I can have them on and doing periodic backups as needed without shuffling disks. That gives me 4 backups. Critical data I have backed up to "a cloud."

With windows 10 end of life this October, and older machines not able to be upgraded to windows 11, consider converting them into backup servers. Running windows 10 after end of life will be dangerous. so you would need to switch to another operating system, like linux.

Back to the question. With 20+ terabyte drives are now common and "low" cost, and unless you have hundreds of terabytes of data to back up, the USB drive solution is a lower cost solution that is not difficult. For example, the 24 TB G-raid system on amazon is $1899. I just bought Seagate EXOS 20 TByte internal disk dives (these are enterprise class) for $379, and 20 TB USB drives are $289. Thus, for 20 TB internal, and 3 USB backup drives, the cost for primary + 3 backups is under $1500, compared to one copy for $1899 with the raid array.