Why does mounting my Drobo 5N on a Mac result in a different path?

Drobo - End of Sale Drobo 5N
1

I’m attempting to Back up my Drobo 5N with Crashplan. When I first started, the “Path” in Crash plan was:

Drobo5N -> drb134601a00819 -> 1

Then when I switched to a new iMac, it changed to:

Drobo5N -> drb134601a00819 -> 2

Now, just this morning, I’m seeing:

Drobo5N -> drb134601a00819 -> 4

My Drobo is mounted as smb://Drobo/Public

Any thoughts?

Chris

2

If you unmount your 5N does the folder /Volumes/drb134601a00819/1 still exist on your Mac? If you’re using the Drobo Dashboard to mount/unmount it should be created and deleted as required. Sometimes it gets stuck though and can be deleted manually.

If instead of using the Dashboard you use the Finder to mount the 5N’s volumes you’ll see them mounted at /Volumes/ instead, which might suit your purposes better.

3

I’m having this same issue. If I mount a volume using the Drobo Dashboard app, it results in my Mac “seeing” a different file path than if I mount a volume through the Finder. This has wreaked havoc on things like iTunes and Lightroom where the app is expecting to see a certain file path and it changes from when I first added the item. How do we prevent this from happening?

4

More info… I just got info on the same file in the Finder, but from two different mount points. Here’s what is listed under “Server”:

afp://Drobo5N.local/Public/Backing Tracks/05 And I Love Her.MP3

smb://Drobo5N/Public/Backing Tracks/05 And I Love Her.MP3

Now the question is, which one should I be using and will be more reliable for the file path?

5

It doesn’t much matter which, as long as you choose one and stick to it. I’ve traditionally used AFP with OSX, SMB/CIFS with Windows but if your Drobo firmware is up to date and you’re using a recent version of OS X you might find SMB2 works better.[hr]

Yes, that does happen, as explained above. So choose one method and stick with it. The Dashboard is useful if you have several Drobos with similarly named shares - you can’t have two mount points names /Volumes/Public (in practice you’d get a /Volumes/Public and a /Volumes/Public-1) for example, but you can have /Volumes/drb1234567890ab/1/Public and /Volumes/drbba0987654321/1/Public.