Automate putting Drobo/DroboShare into Standby

Hello,

First time poster, but hopefully this is in the correct forum …

The power supply to my DroboShare is turned off each night. As such, following the recommendations to avoid data loss, I have to remember to put the DroboShare into standby before shutting down my main PC each day.

Don’t know how likely it is that data loss might occur in practice if power is cut when the Drobo isn’t in standby mode, but I must admit I was a little disappointed with this aspect - my thinking being that surely if these things are intended to help protect your data they should be better able to cope with unanticipated power outages?

Anyway … my question is, would it be possible to write a script or command line utility that could be included in the PC shut down routines that would automatically put the Drobo/Droboshare in standby so that I don’t have to remember to do this manually each day?

Any help / advice would be much appreciated.

Phil

Does the Drobo/DroboShare combination not just go into standby when you shut down your computer?

Most people put Droboshares on their router. Most people don’t turn the routers off.

I would expect that as long as the PC is shut down first, then nothing will be accessing the drobo/droboshare so when you pull the power from the droboshare it shouldnt (that not to say definite) corrupt anything.

however its not the recommended way of doing things

Thanks for the replies so far.

The Droboshare is on the router but the power to the whole workstation area, including router, goes off each night.

I hoped that would be the case, but it’s the “thats not to say definite” bit that concerns me.

As an aside, if I connected the Drobo directly via Firewire or USB rather than Droboshare, would shutting down the PC automatically put Drobo into standby? Or could the Drobo still potentially be carrying out tasks that could cause data loss if the Drobo power was cut?

And back to my original question, how feasible / easy would it be to create a script or command line program that would put Drobo/Droboshare into standby?

if it were directly connected it would automatically go into standby when the pc shutdown UNLESS it doing a rebuild - in which case it will stay on until it finishes - and even if it were doing a rebuild you would want to keep the power on to let it get back to a “safe” state as soon as possible. this would only occur following a disk failure/upgrade

so the short answer to your question is yes, it would automatically shutdown.

In the spirit of “there’s no stupid question” - the PCs do gracefully shut down, right?

im imagining they must, since he wanted a script to run on shutdown, which wouldnt happen if he were just pulling the plug

Yes, I do shut down the PC properly, but currently have to remember to put the Drobo in standby before the power goes off. Quite often I just forget to do this which is why I was after something that might help do this automatically.

In the absence of such a script though, sounds like ditching the Droboshare and connecting the Drobo directly to the PC might be the slightly safer option then?

i would think most definitely

I agree with Docchris. You’ll get much better throughput as well.

OK, thanks a lot for the help and advice. Much appreciated.