Just as a quick User Community - Poll Question:
Which Backup Imaging Pgm are you using to image your PC’s main system hard drive and save the image to your Drobo, in cae you need to restore your pc’s main internal system hard drive ?
I use Clonezilla.
I haven’t saved an image directly to my Drobo, though. Usually I save the image to a USB drive, then copy it over to the Drobo. Yes, great chance of corruption, but I don’t like things touching my Drobo unnecessarily.
We are using both AppAssure Replay4 & Vizioncore vRangerPro to snapshots our product servers Windows workload onto our DroboPro & DroboElite.
I don’t use any on my desktop. I found disk-imaging strategy too cumbersome and I’m not diligent enough to do it on regular basis and only then it would make any sense to me. I chose to use software-based RAID1 on my desktop instead in case one of the system drives bites the dust. Yes, I know it has some drawbacks - won’t save me the reinstalling pain in case of some system-wide software corruption like malware or such but it just works better for me. On my laptop I use the built-in disk imaging tool which comes with Windows 7.
There’s room for both. I have mirrored drives on my desktop, I do disk images for major things (using Clonezilla, as I posted earlier), but I also have a Windows Home Server machine that does incremental backups of my Windows machines, at least.
I’ve found that the Windows Backup in both Windows 7 and Windows 2008 server to be adequate for my needs. It may be putting too many eggs in the Microsoft basket, but I’ve had great success with it. Before then I was using Acronis quite happily.
The hardware independent restore feature of Server 2008 is simply amazing in my opinion. It has worked flawlessly for me in many circumstances.
SyncToy
hi have used acrononis (older version) on an xp machine (oem partitioned drive) - it created a boot disk cd, and that saw the drobo v1 no problems - used it to backup the full drive including all volumes/partitions etc.
(never felt the need to (risk?) trying to restore it though 
Wonderful question, JosephB.
I use Clonezilla for Windows XP and SuperDuper! for MacOS.
I don’t want the 2 Million+ files from a clone, or even more from Time Machine, on my drobo. I run Time machine to a separate drive and my machine clones the boot drive every night to another drive as well. I also backup my data to Crashplan as well.
For my PC, I do the same thing. I use Acronis True Image to do a nightly clone along with incremental backups to an external drive. Data is backed up offsite with Crashplan as well.
Carbon Copy Cloner and WinClone for OSX, Acronis True Image for Windows. Mite be switching to the standard Windows Backup in the future.
I want Crashplan for offsite backup…
FYI,
I have now been using Paragon Backup and Recovery 10 Home (for Windows, previous version called “Paragon Drive Backup 10 Pro”) for 8 months with Drobo S and it works smoothly with the Drobo S.
has anyone actually used a complete restore process (successfully)?
just wondering…