Drobo 5N and EaseUS ToDo Backup Workstation 8.0

Third Party Applications
1

Hi All

1st post here, and a positive report. I did encounter some issues, mostly caused by the overly simplistic documentation…I’m sure I’m not the 1st to encounter this

I’ve been an ardent Windows Home Server user but have encountered buggy issues with the 2011 version that seemed to get worse and now MS have decided to walk away it’s time to find something else that would do the same job…

Enter the 5N,

  1. It’s a really, really neat device, setting it up isn’t quite as simple as the user guide would have you believe though.

  2. Once you have popped in two or three disks and powered it on it takes 10-15 minutes to rumble into life as it’s initialising the disks for the 1st time

  3. The Drobo dashboard app comes alive once it sees the Drobo device powered on and you can get started

  4. The bit that the User Guide conveniently skims over is that you have to create ‘Shares’ in the Drobo’s storage for each device you are going to backup. Think of Shares as folders, i.e. for me it’s PC1, PC2 & PC3

  5. The Shares have to be ‘mounted’, only has to be done once and read/write permissions assigned for each share, again only once and you are in business (the user guide misses this bit out too)

  6. Having had a play with Acronis and Novastor’s backup solutions I’ve finally settled on ‘EaseUS Todo Workstation 8.0 http://www.easeus.com/backup-software/tb-workstation.html It’s not the cheapest (or is on the somewhat out of date recommended software list) but it works really well with the Drobo and it’s also possible to manage of the other PC clients on the network remotely using their Central Management Console, this is, strangely, a lot cheaper than the alternatives as it is a professional IT department kind of tool. http://www.easeus.com/backup-software/central-management.html

  7. In principle you can make a master backup of all of the PC’s disk partitions (uses a good chunk of disk space) and then do incremental backups (i.e. what’s changed) after that

  8. The Drobo dashboard only needs to be installed on one machine, the Drobo gets grumpy if it sees the app on two machines concurrently…