Hi There, I recently bought a new Thunderbolt computer and decided to treat myself to a 5D after hearing all of my friends sing their praises.
I was previously using a LaCie D4 rack with four drives, one for media storage, one to clone that drive, one for time machine and one for old files.
Will the drobo replace this? I know that it creates a big virtual drive so I could save all my media files and old files on it. Am I right in thinking it’ll create an automatic back up of this?
I just purchased a Drobo D5, and am still setting it up and learning some of the quirks involved with it. But I think I can answer your question.
The Drobo D5 is basically a Raid 5 array of HDDs (or SSDs, or a combination). which means it is “fault tolerant.” If one of the drives in the Drobo fails, your data on the Drobo is still intact. The Drobo will continue to operate letting you access your data even though the one drive has failed. You will have to replace the failed drive, and the Drobo will automatically “restore” the newly replaced drive, and just continue to operate as before.
One thing unique about the Drobo is the ability to use various makes and models of HDDs. If a 2TB drive fails you can replace it with a 4TB drive from a different manufacturer. I have an OWC Mercury Elite Raid drive that requires that a failed HDD has to be a match to the failed drive.
Files on the Drobo can be backed up to other backup media (or on-line backup services) for additional redundancy if desired. So if the Drobo was stolen, or suffered some other hardware failure your data is still safe.
Personally I error on the side of caution and keep my media, photo, and other important files which I wouldn’t want to lose on both my internal HD, a Time Machine backup, and external HDDs – now including the new Drobo.
macguync hit an important point - Drobo survives disk failure (or two failures, if Dual Disk Redundancy is used), but it is not a substitute for backup copies or snapshots of important data.
Without a copy or snapshot, nothing stops someone from accidentally overwriting your thesis with “Hello world” or malware replacing it with pictures of laughing goats.