I’m lost. I set up the drobo mini with 2-2TB hard drives. I can see it on the drobo dashboard and under Devices on my mac I see Drobo1. If I click on it, it doesn’t show anything being written to it. My mac system is OS X El Capitan, 10.11.2 and has time machine on it.
My question…HOW do you get your data to transfer to the drobo? Is there no way to have it automatically do a sync every evening, or every other day? I don’t even know how to get ANY info onto the drobo H-E-L-PPPPP please!
I guess I had thought this was going to be an easy set-up like external hard drives…
Thanks
hi cindel,
usually if dashboard can see it, the computer should to, but can i check how you are connecting up the drobo mini?[hr]
for the syncing part / backing up, that can be done, and for me i use syncback (on windows) to manage backups, but some other users mentioned carbon copy cloner which might help you for mac, though 1st step will be saving data to the mini manually, to make sure it works
It is like an external hard drive. If you want to use Time Machine, you could just Open Time Machine preferences and choose the Drobo as a target. It will then start to back up to it. The problem here is that Time Machine will keep backing up until the disk is “full”, then it starts deleting old ones. The way Drobo works with “Thin Provisioning” the Drobo is probably telling your system that it is a 16TB volume, but you do not have anywhere near that much storage in it. As the Drobo fills it’s actual space Dashboard will start complaining at you and the transfer will go slower and slower to make sure that you can never actually fill the Drobo.
If you want to use it with Time Machine there are a couple of ways.
What I have is a Drobo with 2x2TB and 2x3TB, so I have a bit less than 8TB of free space after redundancy. I formatted my Drobo with 4TB volumes, so I got two to begin with, and when I go 2TB->3TB on one of the drives it will probably make another one. I pointed Time Machine at one of the 4TB volumes, whcih are backed by real storage, so when/if it fills Time Machine will do the right thing and delete old backups as it should.
There used to also be an application called TimeTamer that would let you make a fixed size disk image file to put on your Drobo and back up into, but I can’t find it any more. This let you make a backup that you knew would fit within the real storage of your Drobo. Maybe one of the regulars here has some more info?
What disks do you have in your Drobo, and what volume size did you choose when you set it up?
