Stand-alone external capability yet?

Today I wanted to do a restore on my ipad. I backed it up, factory restored, and went to restore the data, but after 25 min of writing, iTunes bombed and said the backup was corrupt. The most recent response I saw to a similar question was 2016 so I’m posting this: Has anyone created an external drive backup solution that doesn’t rely on iTunes or iCloud? I checked professor google and found drives that allow the backing up of pics, but nothing that can be used to store much else.