I’m now officially a 3-Drobo looser.
When Drobo started, I was one of the first to purchase (I still have it) a Drobo4 unit which had both USB & FireWire 800. In an expensive and painfully slow process, I moved ALL of my important files onto it only to have it fail. So, I paid Drobo for support but no joy … ALL of my important files were lost and Drobo had me buy a replacement 4bay Drobo because my original was defective?
My replacement Drobo began with all new drives and not much to put on them because it had all been irretrievably lost so, for several years, all seemed right until I hit the 80% full warning. To be safe, I sent in a diagnostic but Drobo sent back that my support contract had expired. So, I bought a new 5c Drobo with support on special to get the 3 years of support. I contacted them with the diagnostic and was told sn xxx drive was failing and that I needed to follow a procedure to bit clone it and I did this. This was a very lengthy, several month process since the drive had bad sectors but I persevered. It finished, today!
So, per their instructions, I replied to their case email with a new attached diagnostic ONLY to find that my case was closed?
Worse, they no longer will support me because the 90-day support has expired?? Even though I paid for a 3 year support contract they won’t help me transfer my files because I have been following their instructions which took 100 days to complete?
So, I have not a clue what to do, now? I can’t even contact them via email … they respond with gibberish.
Currently, my Drobo is in RO read only mode but it is also in DataProtection: In Progress??? This doesn’t seem possible but they won’t tell we WTF is happening and I am now on my own to try to recover my 8TB of photos and family movies!
The “bad” drive I bit cloned was only a 3TB drive but DataRescue4 indicated that 2.3TB were good but 709MB were bad.
I am hoping the so called redundancy in the Drobo worked this time, unlike my previous experience but since I am on my own, I’d appreciate anyone’s ideas or suggestions.
The company is worthless! They have automated getting money in and NOT doing anything for their so-called support contracts.
I’d never heard of anything like this but then, we have laws in the USA and I guess it is whatever they can get away with, where ever Drobo is?
Failing to get my stuff in a form to transfer it to the new 5c Drobo, I will be selling it cheaply on ebay (buyer beware!), if anyone is interested.
Crooks everywhere, I guess? I’m sure they’ve got themselves covered with lawyers.
I can’t believe I fell for this, again? This tops out more than two grand in total.