Anyone have any tips to encrypt a giant Drobo? This has to be addressed in the future…
I have partitioned my drobo to be one half a Time Machine backup and one half a backup partition.
Is there no way to secure anything on a drobo?
5D supports creating a “Backup volume” from Dashboard; you can chose the size of the filing system when creating the backup volume.
You can use this volume as an encrypted volume.
Please be aware that encryption causes complications for the thin provisioning that Drobo uses. An encrypted volume will cause every block of the filing system to be written to a default encrypted state, which means that you will need enough available disk space for that to happen.
The initial encryption of the volume may take a long time too - the Mac will do this in the background though.
Cheers!
Jason
Thanks for the reply 
It seems as though encryption will put the data at risk which is really not something i’d like to do considering the data needs to be secure! I hope the bods at DR are reading whilst they are making the drobo 6D, Drobo S or whatever it will be called 
hi musio, maybe you can try that virtual drive idea from a while back, where basically you can allocate a certain amount of space to a physical file which gets its own letter, and never increases in size.
maybe a future model will be modular and be called the drobo-X
This is what the Backup Volume does. It creates a new volume (with its own drive letter on Windows) of a restricted size for exactly this sort of purpose - using as an encrypted volume, or using as a backup volume for something like Time Machine (which will use as much space as is available to it).
It seems as though encryption will put the data at risk which is really not something i’d like to do considering the data needs to be secure!
Encryption shouldn’t put the data at risk. I would recommend creating a backup volume, enabling the encryption, and letting the conversion process complete before copying data onto the new encrypted volume.
Cheers!
Jason
(thanks for the clarification jason)