ken zirkel

I have hundreds of gigabytes of precious data, yet my backup plan was manual and inconsistent. I knew I needed some kind of safe, secure, regular backup plan. When Apple announced that Leopard would have a built-in backup feature called Time Machine, I figured that was a good excuse to be more rigorous about backup.

After some research, I settled on Drobo as my hardware of choice. I guess you’d call it a next-generation RAID, which means that it makes two copies of your data automatically. So if you have two 500 GB drives, basically it assigns you 500 GB of storage and 500 GB as a duplicate of your data. So if one drive fails, you still have a safe backup.

But it’s more than just that: it manages your drives in a “smart” way such that it lets you add drives to the array on-the-fly, and it even tells you, by means of an indicator light, when a drive is about to fail or when the storage is mostly full. I first saw the product demo’d at Photoshop World; I thought the price was a bit high, but it dropped a bit since then to a more reasonable level.

Anyhow, I loaded up my Drobo with two 500GB drives, and upgraded to Leopard. Surprisingly, after just a week my drives were nearly full, so I ordered a third drive, this one 1 TB.

The Drobo documentation suggests that you just pop the new drive into the unit, and it will add it to the array without any further action by the user. However, I have to say that in my case it did not immediately recognize the drive. It was only after I shut down the computer, unplugged the Drobo for a minute and re-plugged it, that the third drive was recognized. However, no harm done; all my data was intact and now I had doubled my total storage space.

I was so happy with my Drobo that I wanted to send the URL to a friend, so I typed in the URL in my browser to confirm it was correct. At the bottom of the screen I noticed a promotion, register your Drobo to enter a contest. I figured, what the heck, I clicked.

On the registration form, it asked for the serial number. Where is the serial number for the Drobo? On the bottom of the unit. So I turned my unit onto its side for about 30 seconds while I typed in the serial number and confirmed it.

At that moment, the pleasant whirring of the Drobo fell to silence. Yes, my Drobo had been writing to the drives when I turned it over, I knew that. Time Machine writes to those drives so often that it’s almost continually whirring away. But I thought it wouldn’t matter. After all, laptops routinely get turned all around all the time.

Well, my happy green indicator lights started blinking green-red, green-red. My Drobo software told me: “Disk Error”. It appeared that $500 worth of hard drives were toast. I tried everything I could think of, including writing a heated letter to Drobo support. The best I could come up with was re-formatting the drive, which resulted in blinking green-red lights and a message: “Preparing your drive for data protection. Estimated time: 16 hours”. So I turned off Time Machine, waited for this mysterious process to complete, crossed my fingers and hoped.

The next day, thank goodness, my Drobo was displaying happy green lights again. I turned Time Machine back on, and so far everything seems to be working normally. I did lose all my data, though. Which is OK in this case because it was just a backup. But I offer this tale as a warning to others. Drobo is a good product … but don’t turn it over on its side.