Contrary to http://www.drobo.com/downloads/how-to/HT-TimeMachine_Guide_5N.pdf, when Spindown is turned on, I am finding that Time Machine on all my Macs (all fully patched and up to date) will not “find” the mounted 5N Drobo reliably. Hence the Time Machine backup does not run. I have found that if Spindown is turned off, then (far as I can tell) Time Machine can find the drive on the network and will do as expected.
thats interesting rmshne,
im not sure if this would work in the meantime, but if your time machine backups are scheduled for a particular day of the week (or at a certain time each day), then maybe using another tool to periodically access the drobo, a few minutes before your scheduled backup, would allow your system to spin up/wake up the drobo, in time for timemachine to be able to find it… while still allowing the spindown to be enabled (if you need that)?
Good idea, except:
: how does one “schedule” AppleTime Machine. Nothing in options specifies that. It just does it’s thing at hourly intervals, but at what moment in the hour is not controllable far as I can see.
: it would require yet more systems setup to schedule use another tool to “wake up” the Drobo.
: And also, what tool? If TimeMachine can’t wake up the Drobo, then hard to tell what other method would work. That would require a lot of experimentation and testing
Why can’t the Drobo wake up when TimeMachine comes knocking at the door? I guess it can’t and I observe it does not.
I’m not that crazy about having a continuous backup system going to a NAS. You’re thrashing the beejezus out of all your drives constantly. Time Machine on my Mac and Windows Backup on my Win10 machine each backup to a local USB drive.
Just my opinion.
thanks for the infos,
in the meantime maybe this page could have some useful info for you via the linked website?
http://www.drobospace.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=143858
Who said anything about having a “continuous backup system”?
I am observing that the Drobo 5N will not “wake-up” when Apple TimeMachine initiates a backup of the Drobo 5N spindown is turned on. TimeMachine is not “continuous”, but it runs regularly. Are you saying TimeMachine is “continuous” and thus Drobo’s offering of making it possible to be used as a TimeMachine backup is flawed?
Backup systems typically run once a day, usually overnight. Time Machine on Mac and File History on Windows are running very frequently.
My opinion (and just my opinion) is to backup to an external USB drive and then backup that backup to the Drobo once a day. Which is probably overkill anyway.