I’m looking for an updated data storage facility and the drobo seems the best choice all round. Having said that, I have seen some reviews to say that in some instances, following firmware updates, the drobo lost 2TB of data ;-(

Have you heard anything on this? Is it really as good as other reviews suggest?

Thanks, SAM

Drobo would cost us about £60 to ship to you and there is a risk of damage etc. You can buy Drobo from here without any of the expense or risks of shipping overseas.

Other worldwide suppliers are http://www.drobo.com/where_to_buy/distributors.php. I want the best for my customers. I hope you understand.

Kind regards,

Damien.

That is not how Drobo works. Watch this 4 minute video and you will see exactly what Drobo does. It is not a backup drive in it’s normal guise, it is your data drive. The video explains everything.

I hope this helps.

Damien.

Also when one drive is full – do you just take this out (and store) and replace the drive. What happens when you want to access old data that may be stored on the drive you took out?

Hope this makes sense!!

The Drobo seems to tick most, if not all, of the essential boxes with regard to data storage. I currently backup my photos and video files to multiple removable sata drives (through an icydock bay) and optical disks. If I need the piece of mind to make a third or forth copy I just buy another sata drive, format it and drag the files over. This relies on no software or electronic encription and data tagging, which gives me great confidence should I ever need to recover any data. Very simple and reliable. The down side that is that it’s a manual process that relies on me copying the files in the first place. Bring on the Drobo…

Automated backing up though has it’s issues. While solving one problem it raises others. I am very concerned about being at the will of the Drobo. What if the Drobo breaks, won’t mount on the desktop, is no longer manufactuered, goes out of business or it simply won’t work one day and I can’t get to ANY of my data. Can I simply remove any of the individual sata drives and just plug them into my motherboard as an internal drive and access all the files at a very basic level. Or are they encripted in such a way that I can only see them while inserted in the Drobo unit and through it’s own software?

If the individual drives can be opened and accessed without the Drobo this would solve all of my issues. If not I would still probably buy the Drobo and use it as a secondary backing up solution. You can never have enough backing up options in place.

Thanks
Simon

It’s great to hear from you. Our time machine backups go to a different Drobo than our data. In fact our second Drobo is connected to our network using Droboshare.

Drobo itself is compatible with Time Machine but in a direct connected sort of way as described here. But we wanted Drobo to back up all our computers on our network and we wanted the unit to be hidden away out of sight of burglars etc.

It’s not a simple set up to use Droboshare for Time Machine because it needs some configuring. There is an app that does this and once configured it acts just like an Apple Time Machine connected on a gigabit ethernet.

More info on using Droboshare as a super Time Machine is here and the set up instructions are here. There is a bit of command line entry using Terminal so I suppose it is considered an intermediate level setup.

I hope this helps.

Kindest regards,

Damien.

Drobo is not dast enough when connected via USB2. It’s fine for backups but when it is connected with Firewire 800 it behaves as fast as an internal drive.

Drobo needs SATA drives so you might be better off looking for a drive case that can take other drive types too. You can then RAID configure them but the automated functionality of Drobo wont be available to you.

Regards, Damien.

Interested in this solution. So your Time Machine Backups are to the same drive that you store your wedding/portrait/workshop files on. So how does this folder structure work.

I thought that I might store all my images on the Drobo and have a separate drive to back up the main computer with Time Machine (stuff like price lists, adverts, other docs etc)

Can older drives benefit too
=====================

I have been drooling over this product for some time. But for me there may be a problem, a problem I would appreciate your advice on.

Basically, I don’t have any firewire ports (just USB2) and all my drives are Enhanced IDE type drives.

I have numerous drives, in various caddies, and would love to be able to house them neatly in a Drobo type case and also avail myself of the Drobo features.

My drives are too useful to throw away, and are now too cheap to be worth selling. Hence my desire to press them into service in a Drobo type setup.

So, is what I wanna do possible with IDE drives?

Thanks in advance.

Regards,

Drobo does have full USB connectivity so you can indeed use it to be mirrored by other USB drives or better still another Drobo.

Accidental deletion: Our backup Drobo covers accidental deletion of images with the fantastic ‘Time Machine’. You can go back to the time before you deleted the data. How cool is that.

Theft: As Drobo is completely portable unlike a Mac Pro it can be locked away or taken home at night. It’s perhaps less of a target too.

Lightening: Unplug Drobo in thunderstorms or at night and that’s the lightening sorted.

Fire: I suppose you could put Drobo in a fire proof safe at night. That would be all the bases covered except…

Act of God. I think even our insurance falls short of covering that.

Cheers, Damien.

Our mac pro has mirrored internal hard drives to protect work in progress from drive failure and we use time machine to an external USB drive that is taken offsite daily to protect against the other risks. Archives are to alternative hard drives with USB mirrors that live offsite.

For someone using an imac , laptop or a PC without the mac pro’s easy slot-in drive expansion capabilities I can see the drobo being a very attractive option.

The price quoted is for Drobo itself. The drives you choose to put in Drobo are extra. A lot of users add four 1TB or four 2TB drives. You may already own usable drives.

The 1TB drives in our original Drobo have now been replaced with 2TB drives. The old drives have gone into our new Drobo that we are using as a ‘Time Machine’ back up system.

I bought our four 2TB Western Digital SATA drives from a respected Ebay trader.

Damien.