Forum might’ve covered this topic already, but I couldn’t find it with search.
Anyhoo, I’ve been rocking the first gen Drobo since it came out (in 2007? I think?). And after 3 years it hasn’t given me any problem. But lately my fear of it going bad has been increase quite rapidly since I rely on it more and more as I increase the storage space.
Photos, iTunes backup, documents, and some other stuff that I digitized such as cook books (takes years to scan them and free up my shelf!), DVDs, etc.
I’m trying to think up some possible scenarios if it does go bad, and counter them with some solutions.
The only two things I could think of is with
[list]
[]HDD failure
[]Drobo unit
[/list]
I believe with first scenario I could just swap the HDD out, and that’s the beauty of it. However what happens when the Drobo unit dies? Can I just put all my HDD from the broken Drobo into a new one and still preserve my stuff? I’m no expert in it but I’ve read somewhere if the RAID card dies in a hardware RAID setup, all the HDD content get lost. Is that the case with Drobo?
Should I plan in investing another Drobo unit and mirror the two? What do you guys do? Do you guys have backup of the backup? Please enlighten me!
no, with drobo EVERYTHING is on the disk pack - if your drobo dies, just pop the disks into a new drobo and you are set to go ;)[hr]
plus lots of the @better@ drobos can import disk packs from old drobos, so depending on exactly which model you have now - you could even use it as an excuse to upgrade
I have the very first gen drobo with USB 2.0. One of the thread I came across while searching for the topic was to copy from Drobo to Drobo Pro. It seems like in order to copy from first gen Drobo to Drobo Pro I must use computer as medium to move the files. Is that the case with all the new Drobo product such as Drobo S (seems like a reasonable upgrade for me)? Meaning I have to get another 1st gen Drobo, put my old HDD in, then copy the files to the new Drobo S unit?
You should have a separate copy of all that data that is in your Drobo.
THe Drobo is only as good as if one disk in the pack dies, you will not lose all your data.
Don’t rely on the Drobo to be your ONLY storage repository.
If you imagine how much time you have invested in your data (scanning cookbooks and other things) then imagine your time at a conservative 10.oo an hour, how much did all that data cost you? How many hours did it take you?
Now think about how much a 2TB external HD costs. I just got one for $110.00 last month. Did you spend more than 10 hours collecting your data?
For backup, portability is of main importance, and I don’t mean only the ability to pick it up and carry it.
Media portability - minimize dependence on specific hardware, because relying on specific hardware creates a single point of failure (unless you have a backup of said hardware).
I have some old data on Iomega Zip disks that I couldn’t read on one of my Zip drives. Luckily I had multiple Zip drives. Not the case for the Jaz drive, but I didn’t need the stuff on there.
Accessibility - make sure the backup’s interface is still current. A backup is of little use if you can’t read from it.
Folks with old SCSI tape backup systems had to migrate as SCSI went away. The same thing is happening with Firewire, though at a much slower rate. USB 3.0 remains backward-compatible with USB 2.0 and USB 1.x, so that’s OK, and networking standards have remained pretty standard too.
Longevity - optical storage doesn’t last as long as they initially touted.
I have CDs that I burned ~10 years ago and they don’t all read. You should set a schedule to check/verify/update your backups regularly. Even incremental backups should be refreshed from time to time.
