NAS is basically glorified network drive. You can achieve the same* with USB disk shared over a network.
* disclaimer as actual NAS products can have other features normal USB drive does not have
So NAS is fine, but use one with RAID mirroring (or RAID5/6).
However, note that RAID 1 and 5 protect only against one disk failure, which, using cheap SATA drives, is not that much. Problem is that rebuild takes a long time with large SATA drives, creating a large window where you can loose data.
RAID6 somehow decreases chances of this happening (protects against 2 disk failures), as does using better (not cheap SATA) drives.
For software to copy files over, there are also a number of free alternatives, if you only need to copy data on predefined schedule (for example, see Cobian Backup.
So it all depends on your budget.