I am going to move my current Drobo v2 to backup duty when I receive my Drobo 5D.
Time Machine will write to the volume until it’s full.
I have ~6TB of usable space on my Drobo. My thought was to create 2 volumes. One for TM and one for, well, nothing. If the ‘null’ volume is ~750GB, will that avoid the problem of TM filling up the Drobo?
Is there a more elegant solution to re-purpose my v2 Drobo for backup?
I know about Time Tamer, but it would essentially do the same thing in software that I was going to do with volumes (Limit the size of the TM sparsebundle).
Because Drobo does thin provisioning, it will cheerfully promise anything until it runs out of real space; you can’t “reserve” free space for a different volume. To prevent your Drobo from actually becoming full, you will need to have the TM volume be smaller than the total amount of space in your Drobo.
If you create a 4TB volume with DashBoard, then I guess you wouldn’t need Time Tamer’s “volume within a volume” trick.
hi mgriffin maybe also something like truecrypt which makes a single file container might work in the same way?
just in general though, unless someone is a power user/developer, is time machine actually worth it if it runs in real time making (potentially unneccesary extra) backups)…
eg
if someones coding all day and making versions and apps often, i can see the benefit, but for a casual user, wouldnt something like a full acronis once a month or differential weekly do the trick?
just wondering, in case time machine is another (buzz word) that all mac users might feel they might have to use
Time Machine is really easy to use. It’s so tightly integrated into the Finder and Apple applications.
I use Crashplan for my off-site backup. I like Time Machine for the fast, local backup/restore. I also use Winclone to keep images of my Boot Camp partition.
I just wanted to make sure the Drobo’s ‘slowing down when full’ behavior was device and not volume based.
thanks, im pretty sure its device-based, and not volume-based,
i say this because ive had the 1st 2tb volume almost full for ages and it was only when the 2nd volume started having more data pushing it past 90/95% overall when i noticed a bit of slowdown.
i heard with crashplan that it can always keep versions of files indefinitely (eg not just for 30days)
how does that work for you…is it simply treating other versions of the file as files which simply take up some more space as part of (and towards) your total usage allowance?
(also your last sentence had 4 programs in the same sentence… CrashPlan, TimeMachine, WinClone and BootCamp
AFAIK, Crashplan doesn’t have a limit. They haven’t had one since I signed up (January 2012). I have about 4TB of data stored with them currently.
I’m really not looking forward to the day when I have to pull any substantial amount of data down from them. Which, is why I’m trying to make sure I get the Drobo/TM thing figured out.
CrashPlan states they don’t have a limit. I’ve used them for several years, and have corresponded with them and used with their tech support. They have been consistently honest and direct in all my experiences, so if they say “no limit” I believe it.
The main reason I like CrashPlan is that you can use the same interface, software, and configuration with both remote and local storage. This means that we can do a local backup and send it anywhere, either for storage or as a “seed.” In fact, I’ve done exactly this: back up my step-mother’s computer to my MacBook, then copy the CP archive to my WinXP “server” after I fly home, to save weeks of uploading over a slow connection.
If you don’t have a local CrashPlan archive, you could still pay Code42 to ship you a hard drive (or 7) with your data from their servers.
Edit: The advantage of Time Machine is that it’s well integrated into OS X. Even the OS install asks if you wish to also restore data from Time Machine. Time Machine has its problems, but it is wonderfully convenient and it creates real copies of the files, not some proprietary archive format.
Very good to know that someone has 4TB on CrashPlan!!
I had looked at Carbonite in the past and the fine print in their service agreement said their “unlimited” storage was really limited to the usage of an “average user” - and we are surely not “average” users!
