Mavericks/Time Machine

Forum History Drobo
1

I have struggled to get my Drobo (2nd Gen) to reliably work with Time Machine since I bought it a few years ago. Gave up and unplugged the Drobo…until now. I’d like to make sure I have a good backup system and wanted to revisit the Drobo. I’ve got it connected via Firewire to my iMac 27 inch running Mavericks. It has three Western Digital 1 TB drives in it (although, since powering it back on after about a year, one of drives has a red light next to it). I have the latest Mavericks update, Drobo firmware, and Drobo Dashboard. Time Machine has basically been stuck “backing up 5.3 MB of 370.24 GB” since I started the backup about 12 hours ago. Dashboard has connected with my Drobo a couple times and now can’t even find the Drobo. Re-launching Dashboard might fix that, but I"m getting tired of restarting…and restarting, just to find my drive.

I have two questions for anybody that may be able to help (since Drobo no longer will support my Drobo). First, can I get my Drobo to work with Time Machine? Second…even if I do, will the Drobo work as well as any other drive to allow me to easily restore from a Time Machine backup in the event of a hard drive failure on my Mac. So far, my experience has been that the Drobo is very unstable and finicky in how it has to be set up to work at all. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank in advance.

2

I have not had any success in getting my Drobo 2nd gen working. I now have a WD 1 TB drive, WD 2 TB drive, and another WD 1 TB drive installed. My Drobo indicates that one of my WD 1 TB drives (WD Green) has failed, despite the fact that if I remove it and place it into my Thermaltake HD dock, it works fine and Mac Disk Utility “verify disk” checks it out as fine (don’t know if that is a good evaluation of the drive…but seems like it is). I reformatted the drive and have put nothing on it yet, but find that it is active all the time. I am really disappointed in this drive. Especially since Drobo will no longer offer me any assistance with it. I have been totally abandoned by them, and feel that this drive has been totally useless and a waste of my money…which I spent more of initially, expecting to get a superior product for backing up my important data. It was so ridiculously complicated to set up initially and has been so difficult to “attempt” to get working successfully, that I cannot recommend Drobo and will certainly not ever buy one again. Very disappointing!