Backing up data is important for virtually anyone who uses a computer. Of Zen and Computing has numerous articles on this topic — hard drives go bad and important files are lost. Music, movies, family photos, business documents, all these things are susceptible to hard drive failure. And if by chance the drive is not completely dead, a data recovery shop is sure to charge you and arm and a leg to get your files back.
These days, I’m keeping my data safe with a Drobo from Data Robotics. This slick device appeals to anyone who wants data security without having to jump through hoops and juggle hard drives.
How Drobo Works
- Drobo is an enclosure with slots for multiple hard drives. You load up your Drobo with drives, then connect it to your computer with a USB or FireWire cable.
- You save your files to the Drobo, which appears as if it were a single external hard drive.
- Drobo splits up your files across the multiple drives living inside, so that it has multiple copies of your data.
- In the case of a hard drive failure, you open the Drobo, pull the bad drive and replace it with a fresh one.
Since Drobo had multiple copies of your data stored across all the drives, you can replace the bad drive without losing any data. Drobo then senses the new drive, shuffles your data around and starts using it.
How Drobo uses drives
Since Drobo replicates your data across all the drives inside, it needs to claim some of each drive’s storage space in order to provide this protection. Here’s how my Drobo is set up at the moment:
- Bay 1
- 1 terabyte hard drive
- Bay 2
- 1 terabyte hard drive
- Bay 3
- 500 gigabyte hard drive
- Bay 4
- Empty
These three drives add up to a capacity of 2.5 terabytes. Drobo is using 963.12 gigabytes to protect my data and 2.44 gigabytes for its own overhead, leaving me 1.33 terabytes of space in which store files.
Additional Features
Drobo can connect to your computer via either USB 2.0 or FireWire.
You can “daisy chain” multiple Drobos together via FireWire, meaning that having multiple Drobos doesn’t automatically necessitate having one USB or FireWire port per Drobo. You just connect one Drobo to your computer, then inter-connect the other Drobos with FireWire cables. You’ll see each individual Drobo on your computer.
The hard drives inside your Drobo don’t need to be matched in terms of capacity or manufacturer. I’m using both Western Digital
What Drobo is not
If you use Drobo as your primary storage device, Drobo is not a way to recover deleted files. If you delete a file from your Drobo you can’t get it back from one of the drives. However if you use Drobo as a backup drive in some sort of situation where you sync your files to it on a schedule, you may be able to recover deleted files from your Drobo and copy them back to your primary storage device if you get them before the next synchronization takes place.
Drobo is not a complete backup solution as it doesn’t protect against theft or damage. For example, if someone breaks into your home and steals your Drobo it’s obviously gone. If you were to experience a flood or fire and the Drobo is damaged, you may lose data. To protect against these types of situations, you need an off-site backup wherein you keep another copy of your data at an alternate location such as a relative’s house, data center, or in a safe deposit box.
Cons?
I have been using my Drobo daily for 2 months with no complaints worth mentioning. Initially the Drobo Dashboard software seemed to be unstable on my Mac, hanging whenever I put the Drobo in standby and quit the application. The most recent software seems to have solved that problem.
There are complaints floating around the web claiming that if you have a lot of data, Drobo can take a very long time to reorganize itself when you replace a drive. This Data Robotics tech support document acknowledges that it is possible for the rebuild process to take “several hours or even longer”. I have no first-hand experience with this rebuild process.
How I’m using my Drobo
After years of moving files around each time I got a new computer, I decided to stop keeping data on my laptops and workstations and store it on a Drobo instead. I used to have external hard drives set up to mirror my internal hard drives and run nightly backups, but that was more difficult to manage. I had all these external drives taking up desk space, lots of wires, and an annoying slowdown if I happened to be on the computer at 2 or 3 AM when my nightly backups kicked in.
Saving my files to a Drobo and knowing they’re instantly replicated is a lot easier. I keep all sorts of data on the Drobo – business documents, client projects, photos, and an archive of scanned paper documents and receipts. And when I run out of space, all I need to do is add a larger drive.
The best thing about a Drobo for casual computer users is that it is very easy to set up. There is no complicated RAID configuration… you don’t even have to crack your case open. Simply install the Drobo software, put some blank hard drives in the bays and hook the device up to your computer. The setup process will ask you a few questions about how your device should be configured. It will then format your drives and you’ll be ready to go.
I’m using the standard 4-bay Drobo which is also the one pictured throughout this article. There is also a 5-bay Drobo S
