Drobo issues

**bob carnie** · 17-Oct-2016, 07:34

Thank you all for your great responses, I am talking with a good friend in Seattle about how to go about this and, for sure come up with a plan.

One thing is for sure , I need to take the responsibility of storage away from myself as I am not as tech savvy as many of you here and I could run into a few major problems.

I think Cloud Archive with minimal back and forth looks promising , for me.

I will continue with the Drobo for day to day access but not for archiving.

Bob

**seezee** · 17-Oct-2016, 08:25

Originally Posted by Preston

Bob, I suggest you purchase 'enterprise grade' HD's such as the Western Digital Red or Western Digital RE.

I 2nd that recommendation. These drives are designed for NAS environments. They are more isolated to vibration, which is important when you have so many spinning disks in close proximity. That's why they typically last longer and carry the extended warranty. The price keeps dropping, too, so by the time you expand capacity it shouldn't cost much more than your last round.

I don't know the Drobo software, but it probably has a health-check feature to give you some idea of whether any of the drives is about to fail. Always keep a spare.

**seezee** · 17-Oct-2016, 09:24

Originally Posted by bob carnie

I think Cloud Archive with minimal back and forth looks promising , for me.

I will continue with the Drobo for day to day access but not for archiving.

Don't rely on remote backup as your only backup. A backup plan must include redundant on-site and off-site archives; otherwise, it's not a backup plan. All storage media (flash storage, hard drives, tape archives) fail eventually. Your house could burn down. Your off-site provider could go bankrupt. At a minimum, you want RAID 1 (mirroring) + off-site backup (e.g., portable drive in a safe-deposit box). Ideally, you should have RAID 5 (fully redundant storage) + off-site + cloud backup. The cloud is the last resort since it takes forever to restore from.

Don't believe your provider could fold? Listen to this story.

**Peter De Smidt** · 17-Oct-2016, 10:02

This is what I do.
1) I have a back up disk in my computer. So all of my data files are on two drives. Using a Drobo/Raid....is similar.
2) I have a couple of large external hard drives. Every so often, I back up everything to them. I should store one off-site, but I don't, as I'm not that industrious.
3) On line storage. I use Dropbox, but other options might be better. Good ones allow you to send them a drive/drives full of your images so that you don't have to upload a tremendous amount of data. They also will send you a drive in the case where you need all of your files.

**nonuniform** · 18-Oct-2016, 15:15

I think you're lucky to get 5 years out of a drive these days. I use Backblaze, a Drobo, several external drives, and a raid 0 drive for files I'm currently working on (1gb scans). Haven't had a catastrophic failure in 20 years. Drives die all the time, but the data has multiple backups.