Hi everyone,
I am a brand new Drobo owner and have a quick query.
Since I am warned that by entering a new hard drive into the Drobo, its information will be erased, what happens to a drive when you remove it from the Drobo and replace it?
Since it has already been formatted by the Drobo, does it retain the information on it or does it too get erased?
Thanks!
If you remove the drive it will retain the data but bare in mind only the drobo will understand it. Further more changes then made to the drobo will result in the data on the removed drive being out of sync so no longer any good.
Long and short is if you are planning to put it in a safe just incase, it won’t be any good to you.
Thank you garethi, v helpful.
Also if I were to remove the drive from the Drobo and slot in that very same drive again, does it erase the drive again?
I am very new to the Drobo having used it for the first time on a film shoot. I am flying back with it and two hard drives from SF to London in a couple of days so would appreciate advice on best method of protecting the data and drobo. I have already removed the Hard drives from the Drobo as I thought travelling with them separately in two different bags would be safer. Now worried that maybe I shouldn’t have removed them from the Drobo reading above posts. Anyone pls advise. Thanks KaliFilms
@KaliFilms - just put the drives back into the dRobo before you attach power and you should have no problems.
If you remove a drive while the unit is running, and then place it back, it will treat it as a new drive, format it, and move data around to utilize the “newly-aquired space”.
@azdragonlord, that is incorrect.
If you remove the drive from the drobo and then reinsert it, it will go into data protection for a few minutes but it WILL NOT erase any data on that drive.
Thank you Jennifer.
Therefore drives that have already been inserted into the Drobo can be re-inserted without issue.
If you keep them in a disk pack. So you have 4 drives in the drobo and decide to pull one to see what it does and insert it right back in. No problems. No formatting, no erasing of data. The drobo will relayout just to make sure everything is a-ok. Mine usually takes 2-3 minutes when I do it. And trust me, I do it a lot.
Now if that drive was in Drobo 1 and you moved to Drobo 2 that only had 2 drives in it, then that moved drive will be reformatted and all data erased.
Or if you have 4 drives in Drobo 1 and get a new Drobo, and move all the drives to the new drobo, all the data is safe and still there.
Hope this makes sense.
Thank you for educating me, I thought I understood the process. I don’t want to mislead anyone.