xcell wrote:
Dashboard showed less than 70% used space... plausible to believe that there was something not going right - at 85% the orange light should come up first, anyway.
Upzided (3 TB) the drive - then, another right light - without Drobo starting the "rebuilding" process.
After inserting another 3 TB disk the "rebuilding" process started - then all light showed green and the file systems where damaged as it seems - beyond repair - or do you have a suggestion?.
Call the support. They are fast and very helpful.Do you have the firmware that support 3TB drives? And the latest and new Dashboard
I could be wrong but from what I have gathered, Drobo uses proprietary format which cannot be recovered once crashed, unlike other popular formats. This is one reason some people do not use Drobo (I myself ain't sure why they are so popular since they are neither cheap nor particular reliable). Your best bet would be to contact Drobo ASAP really.
But Drobo or not, always have at least 2 copies of everything, 3 copies are even better because anything can fail.
Thank you for your information.
Both Drobos have the latest versions of Drobo Dashboard and Drobo firmware*
* At least that is what the "check for updates" in Dashboard wrote...
Thank you for letting me know that a firmware update is available for drives >2TB - Technical Support did not mention and checking for updates in Dashboard did not reveal this nor the available Dashboard update(s)
I have manually updated Dashboard an firmware; still:
a) DroboS is not visible on Desktop (although in Dashboard)
b) Capacity and Tools shows 7.21 TB of "unallocated space" (of total 7,21 and used 4,28)
FYI: I have disks with a total of 11 TB (4x2 TB, 1x3 TB) inserted.
Dec 10, 2011 at 05:47 AM
Lars Johnsson Offline • • • • • • • Upload & Sell: Off
I use PC and Windows so i don't know how it should look on your computer.
But those 11TB gives you 5,44TB when using "dual redundancy protection" like you do. And when you changed your 2TB drive against the new 3TB drive, you did NOT upsized your Drobo capacity. If you use dual redundancy protection you must replace more than one drive with your combo. That could be one of your problems when you got the red light.
xcell wrote:
Thank you guys for all your comments and sympathy...
I used the DroboS to store my iTunes lib, another unit - a 2nd gen Drobo - is/was used to backup the rest of my data; I am now trying to revocer the iTunes lib on it.
I have contacted "Retrodata" in this case and what I have found on their website, was not very encouraging in investing in a third Drobo unit: "We are receiving more enquiries relating to failed DROBO storage units than all other NAS devices combined...It is our opinion that if you currently have important data on any Drobo storage device, you ensure you have backups that have been verified."
Should have read this BEFORE buying a DROBO...
End of lamenting - is there any better solution than Drobo out there to handle data in a similar way?; after all, the idea behind it seemed quite genuine.
You are welcome But I was serious, any raid type of setup is susceptible, ruling out cheap junk, until you get into the big data center money. Though maybe there are some basic issues with Drobo. But if you backup everything it doesn't matter.
For whatever reason, "check or updates" does not always work on my Drobos. I typically need to manually update the firmware. I have both the 8 Bay Drobo and the original 4 Bay Drobo.
Some devices that are not compatible with 3TB drives may still work with them but can see less than 2 of the 3 TB. And I have no idea whether it sees the first part of the drive or bits of it spread all over the drive.
On one device (not a Drobo) I got a reported capacity of about 0.8 TB from a 3TB drive. I ended the experiment then and there and got a 3TB-compatible device.
If the Drobo with old firmware worked like this then you'd actually be decreasing overall capacity by installing the bigger drives, so then the Drobo would reasonably want another bigger drive.
Drobos and such are great protection against a failed drive or two but not against a failed Drobo or against a bad command (e.g. user deletes all files).
I went through a disaster a few years ago in which my twin mirrored drive pairs and my primary external CD backup all failed. I lost no data because I had other backups but the OS partition was cactus. Within two weeks I had most of it rebuilt and much the same disaster happened again. That day I bought a new computer because I had no way of telling what was failing. A few weeks ago I had a similar run of bad luck when I had two drives fail progressively (intermittent faults at different times, eventually deteriorating to permanent faults), an intermittent cable fault and a Mac OS deficiency affecting SATA 3 drives - all at the same time. That's four fully independent problems at once ! Luckily I had several backups on multiple drives but such a run of problems sure mucked up my backup planning because suddenly I needed to make many more full drive backups than I would normally need and I didn't have as many HDDs available on-site as I would have liked. Just goes to remind us that bad things happen and that even a second backup is not enough to rely on.
I am having similar issues. Have Three 1TB drive, and one 500Gig drive 90%JPG, or NEF files. In about 50 directories (by date, by event). About 1/3 of the folders are empty.. Folder names there .. but no images.Be careful if you update dashboard... OLDER DROBO is not supported by newer Dashboard.
Note all disks have Green lights, and chkdsk /x found some issues and fixed.
Called customer support--1 hour plus on phone, ran chkdsk /x, then started r-studio.. They tried multiple help issues.. changed dashboard to older version for my device.. methodical, patient, but.. still no data recovery.
Waiting to see if outcome of the r-studio it is running 20 hours now.. predicts 8 days.... BUT it thinks it needs to scan 16TB
Cant find documentation on the "GPT partition"
I can deal with the time frame if i knew it would be successful.
NO I didnt have backups.. that what the DROBO was for. to make me feel secure that the data was on a "RAID" type device.
I wish you good luck in recovering your data. It's happened to most of us with a long track record of computer use at some point, and with variable consequences.
I must say that I have never felt confident about RAID systems. My own preference has always been to have at least two independent sets of backups, one of them incremental and the other a mirror of the master set. Clearly nothing but additional offsite copies can provide the highest level of security however I have more than once seen offsite tapes fail to solve the problem as the backups feeding them had failed and not been checked: this in a quite large media organisation.
Given the current low cost of drives and the many backup applications freely available (I use a Robocopy script - it still works with win7/64) a more robust solution than RAID (IMHO) is actually cheaper.
Roy
But I was serious, any raid type of setup is susceptible, ruling out cheap junk, until you get into the big data center money. Though maybe there are some basic issues with Drobo. But if you backup everything it doesn't matter.