So I bought the Drobo 5N because it says it works well with backing up all the photos and movies. So, I backed up all of the movies and photos to my Drobo 5N. Now, I open up iMovie '11 and it doesn’t see the drive or movies.
What gives? How do I get it to see it?
I’ve asked this question to drobo support directly, and they say to ask Apple. I go over to Apple, and they say to ask Drobo people.
The infinate loop.
Who has got iMovie working with their Drobo 5N? I can’t. Any help would be great. Thanks.
I have a Drobo 5N and iMovie, and while I only store recorded tv films etc on the Drobo, iMovie can see them and import them without any issues. A silly question, but have you mounted the relevant Drobo share?
Did you back up your iPhoto / iMovie libraries directly to the 5N?
OS X tends to be very fussy about requiring the iPhoto / iMovie libraries to be on a local drive and it isn’t easily fooled. You can attempt to bypass this requirement by creating some special sparse volume, but I don’t know how to do that so can’t advise.
What I do is run by drives locally and store my backups on the Drobo. You just need to copy them back to open them, you can’t open them from their network location…
Yes, I mounted the share. I can see the share come up within iMovie but it doesn’t show any movies within the event library on the share.[hr]
Then what is the point of having an external drive if your photos and movies can’t be read on them? I can’t copy and open them back to my hard drive because there are too many photos and videos. I just want it to see it…and load them from the 5N. Isn’t that what the Drobo 5N was boasting about?
Taken right from their datasheet: “It intelligently uses the high-performance SSDs to accelerate performance of the storage array, allowing applications such as Adobe Lightroom and Apple
iPhoto or iTunes fast access to data.”
Does nobody use iMovie or iPhoto on their Macs with a Drobo? I can’t be the only one.
I would be interested in knowing too. I could not do it with a network share.
I did do it by setting up an iSCSI drive on my none Drobo server and buying an iSCSI driver for my Mac Mini since a driver is not included in OSX. iSCSI is very good at pretending it is a local drive. I do not believe the 5N supports iSCSI at this time. It could be a question for Drobo support. The protocol is supported on the more expensive 800i.
Drobo said it was good for backup, which is not what you’re doing. You’re offloading it entirely. I’m not going to go into too much depth here, but the way an OS accesses a local disk is fundamentally different than how it accesses a network disk. Doesn’t matter whether we’re talking Mac OS X or another OS, and doesn’t matter if it’s a Drobo 5N or someone else’s NAS - even an Apple Time Capsule. Local storage and network storage are different at a fundamental level.
The vast majority of applications don’t need to know or care about such low-level details. A very few do - and they cannot keep their data on a network volume. That is the fault of the application; it is not the fault of the Drobo. This can also change from version to version; World of Warcraft used to run from a NAS, and with the new expansion now does not.
It doesn’t mention iMovie, which is vaguely known not to work with NAS volumes. Honestly, this is the type of problem that’s nigh impossible to learn about prior to running into it (and posting on troubleshooting forums), but it is an innate problem in some applications. Lightroom and Premiere may run fine while Apple apps don’t, as it’s an application design issue.
Billy, I think that I’ve seen the same behavior, and I think that it has to do with the way that the Finder manages mounted network drives.
Make sure that you can see the Drobo mounted on your desktop and make sure that you can access its files. Then open a Finder window and make sure that you can see the Sidebar. (View, View Sidebar) drag the disk image from your desktop into the top, “Favorites” section of the Sidebar. Now whenever you open a File dialog box from within an app, the mounted Drobo drive will show up in the Sidebar. Try to do that from iMovie (File, Open Library, Other…) and then select the drive image that you dragged to the Sidebar.