This relates to drobopro and use on Macs. Specifically the use of time machine.
I have a drobopro on a mac mini, sharing it to a few other macs. Reading through the kb it says to use apple disk utility to partition the drobo volume for tm use. However, elsewhere it warns about not using anything other than the dashboard.
Advice also seems to say that it is best pracice to split off tm backup on their own area.
So, with all this advice is it best to:
Add a smart volume for tm backups, with sparse bundles for each machine.
Partition the one smart volume with disk utility
Just control tm use with the likes of sparse bundles on the one smart volume.
There is no right or wrong answer I susect, but how do you do yours?
There is more than one way to do it. I used the Timetamer script which creates .sparsebundle files for backup for 2 MB’s. The DroboPro is connected to a mini, and it has its own SmartvOlume for doing Time Machine backups.
In the future, if you think KB articles are wrong, please post links to them instead of making broad claims. It is the only way readers can see what is going on or for DRI to make changes.
The reason the time machine KB was created was because TM will keep writing to the virtual volume size. So if you initially created a 4/8/16TB volume but don’t have that much space TM will keep trying to write to that size. When that happens, when TM fills up your drobo and keeps still trying to write to it, we would see the drobo go into reboot loops, data severely corrupted etc.
So we created that KB to let you know to create a volume just for TM that was SMALLER than the amount of available data you have on your drobo so future problems don’t arise.
But like Switcher said, you can use TimeTamer or you can use Disk Utility. Or you can initially format your drobo thru dashboard to have smaller volumes than what’s available.