Any experience with Drobo?

Considering the purchase of a Drobo for multi-drive backups. I have researched the various models and see price ranges from around $300 to $800 for a 4-5 hard drive setup. Has anyone or does anyone use a Drobo, opinions appreciated.

DROBO is a good system for data redundancy. It is not a good back up strategy. This is because any errors on your original drive are immediately copied to the redundant drives. So, if a file is corrupted or if a malicious file gets on your primary drives it will immediately be copied to the others. This problem means tht your data is not truly backed up in a secure manner. FWIW, I use JABOD - Just a bunch of disks. I use SyncToy to back up to external drives only when I am sure all is OK with the files and system.

I have one for data storage. It has 4 bays and can supposedly handle drives up to 4 gb each, but the computer sees it as one drive. It does it's own redundancy. If a drive goes bad, you can eject and replace it and not lose any data. I have not yet had to replace any drives, so I've not been able to test that capability. I back up My Documents on the Drobo, store all my Photoshop files there as well as all my digital RAW files. I did have a computer fail a little over a year ago, and just moved the Drobo over to the machine and was back in business after reloading programs on the new computer, which is still a PITA. Still, no data lost, and I just copied the My Documents files back to my C: drive. The only negative thing I have to say about it is that sometimes it just becomes unresponsive. Requires unplugging and replugging it in and unconnecting and reconnecting to the computer. Haven't figured out why this happens.

DROBO is excellent for backup. Jay and I have been using it for a few years now. We have older images archived there, and can easily access those files at any time - as long as the DROBO is hooked up. Backups are quick and easy if you do them regularly. Tony is right about how the system works. And in addition, when the system is completely full, you can just pull out the smallest capacity drive and replace it with a larger one. It will handle the double backup automatically, and you won't lose data.

Ed's point is not an issue for us - since our system doesn't spontaneously back up to the DROBO. We run the backup when we want it done - using software that handles the backup on a schedule. There's no "immediate" transfer of data.

Thanks Ed, Tony and Varina. Good to hear others thoughts and experiences.

No big complaints about my Drobo S, which I've had a little under a year now. However, I did notice that certain functions on my computer are a tick slower (file browsing, for instance), which I attribute solely to the Drobo.

Max

I passed on the Drobo. At the time they were slow and questions were present about their proprietary method of writing data to their drives. I found a great alternate solution that still is faster. I picked up an eSATA card for my computer and laptop and have been employing (2) 5 bay drive enclosures from FirmTek. These enclosures are eSATA as well. Drives in these enclosures transfer data as quickly as an internal drive. You can configure the drives how ever you like. I set up multiple mirrored raids OS X. I can transfer 1TB of Data in 6 hours (a long estimate) making drive duplication a piece of cake. I wrote about this in more detail on my blog sometime ago. http://www.jmg-galleries.com/blog/2009/01/22/a-happy-ending-to-my-drive-crash/

I can transfer 1GB of Data in 6 hours...

Is there a typo in there???

Thanks for the additional info Jim. And as Mark mentioned is there a typo there, right now I'm just going USB to USB at around 400GB in 3 hours.

Oops! That was supposed to be 1TB in 6 hours and that is a long estimate
Thanks for spotting that Mark.