Best Raid For Backup

RAID is not a backup. RAID can protect against a drive failure, but that is not the only way you can loose your data. If you value your pictures, you need to protect them from other risks such as viruses, data corruption (as a result of memory errors or power failure, for example), theft of your system, accidental deletion, disaster (such as a fire) etc. etc. RAID does nothing to protect against these possibilities.

A sound backup strategy requires you to make two copies of your data which are offline, at least one of which is stored offsite. If you are going to purchase extra disks for purposes of backup, buy external drives and use backup software, do not set them up as RAID.

I managed a data centre for many years and we used RAID arrays for our servers because ANY downtime would idle hundreds of workers and cost the company a LOT of money. We received several requests every month to restore data from our backups - but our servers were never down due to a disk failure. That's the real reason to use RAID - not for backup, but to increase uptime.

I've used RAID 1, and tried RAID 10. My current storage drive uses 4x 1TB RAID 5 (3TB total storage).

Really, they all work. So it's a matter of preference as to how many drives you actually need to have to meet storage capacity.

Assuming you have a high megapixel camera (since you are a pro) and take lots of photos, you use a lot of space. This is the advantage of RAID 5, which lets one drive fail and the others can keep on spinning til you repair it. As others have said, RAID doesn't help if you get a virus or have corruption of the entire RAID.

Your best bet is to get a portable backup drive you back up on the weekend (the more often the better, obviously.) One that just plugs into your USB. A step up from there is a NAS (Network Attacked Storage) solution. This would speed up transfers compared to USB, and let you manage the drives outside your normal computer. You always have the backup connected over your network, and can transfer things at any time... less clutter on your desk.

Or you can build your own networked backup computer, using an off the shelf MB with built in RAID options. Even the basic motherboards now have built in RAID options. So put a small drive in for the OS, and stack up some larger ones into RAID for storage. If you want to add an additional RAID to that, basic 4xSATA RAID controllers cost about $100, with 1/0/10/5/JBOD as the standard. Anything fancier than that and the price jumps up steeply.

So... exactly how much storage do you require for all your work files? If it's less than 1TB, grab a couple usb external drives, and alternate your copy overs. If you think you'll fill more than that, look into NAS or build a backup server.