I just got one, and I want to reserve some space to backup my computer and some to just store media. My question is simple, can I partition a drobo at any time and then disolve the partition at any time? Does it work just like any hard drive attached to a mac? Or do i have to partition it in advance?
As with any hard drive, you must partition it before you can use it. If you delete the partition, you lose all data on that partition. The difference between Drobo and a regular hard drive is that you cannot later resize partitions on the Drobo. Also, you can’t set just arbitrary volume sizes. That means you may not be able to create multiple partitions and prevent one from filling up all the space on the Drobo. There are ways around that.
There’s good documentation about this in the manual and on the web site. Start with http://dashboardhelp.datarobotics.com/170/en/mac/index.htm
Back up how? If using Time Machine, read the article about it at http://support.datarobotics.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/67/session/L3NpZC9kRnh6d1Vuaw%3D%3D/sno/0
If using an imaging program like SuperDuper!, you just make an image of the drive. Leave a bit of extra space for when your drive becomes more full, I guess.
If using an incremental third-party program like Retrospect, configure the backup set to go to disk. You can play with retention policies and so on, too, but that’s slightly outside the scope of this forum.
I tend to start using shiny new things without reading the manuals, but this is one time when reading the manual will save you headaches later. Also, posting the same question to multiple threads at once will not endear you to people.