RAID has nothing to do with backup. I mean you COULD have backups on a RAID if you want to throw money at it, but RAID technology benefits LIVE data availability (as in provides better storage bandwidth, through striping, and overall availability - or up-time - through mirroring and error correction).
LIVE data is the opposite of backup actually, because it can be subject to user error (like accidental deletions or overwrites), and also faults in software which are far more likely to occur in a live setup, and against which RAID provides next to zero protection.
If it's the MFT, and you're on a Mac, Diskwarrior might work. After repeatedly moving my Drobo from laptop to desktop, I had an issue with it not mounting anymore. Diskwarrior checked and fixed the problem. Took a few hours. After that I learned that you have to put a Drobo in Standby, not just eject it, and then it will safely check out.
BTW, while I'm sure the population of problems with Drobo may outreach all others, it may also be that there are more Drobo's out there than other NAS units. That all being said, no one device should ever be depended on. I use a Drobo, plus another Drobo as a local backup, and Backblaze as an online backup.
Not even going to read this to the end.. Just conjurers up too many bad memories.
I had a failure with DroBo.. Spoke to the CEO of the place as my submission went viral and he wanted all the details. He sent me out a new unit -- with 4 drives. And, as the idiot I am, I trusted them once more with a new piece of product.
Needless to say... I am the idiot.
I will NEVER trust anything this company makes ever again with data -- period. The loses are still felt to this day here.. Things that can't and won't ever be recovered.
I gave up with very poor back up service from Drobo some years ago, (along with the fact that it takes days for the system to rebuild if a drive goes down).
I switched to G-Tech's G-Speed RAID drives. Great speed, great customer service, (from previous experience), and rebuild times in hours not days.
I use two of these - one for RAW files and one for finished PSD/ TIFFs. I have 2 sets of backup drives for each, just in case.
Days for a single drive failure? I have updated drives (swapped out as if just like a failure) and it has taken hours but never days. in that time all my work has been totally accessible to use too.
sjms wrote:
Days for a single drive failure? I have updated drives (swapped out as if just like a failure) and it has taken hours but never days. in that time all my work has been totally accessible to use too.
On the Drobo site and forums the generally acknowledged speed to rebuild is 1TB a day. Their older, now discontinued drives, like the Gen 2, were only about a third that speed. I had drives fail in three Gen 2's over a 7 year period. It would take 6 to 10 days to rebuild the drive, but the data was accessible during the rebuild.
Drobos generally have a poor reputation, but I don't understand how anyone can risk having a single set of data on a low-cost storage device without backups. I could argue that such devices are less reliable than individual drives, because FS corruption or hardware failures can be as common as disk failures.
Jeff Donald wrote:
On the Drobo site and forums the generally acknowledged speed to rebuild is 1TB a day. Their older, now discontinued drives, like the Gen 2, were only about a third that speed. I had drives fail in three Gen 2's over a 7 year period. It would take 6 to 10 days to rebuild the drive, but the data was accessible during the rebuild.
i'm running a 5D w/ the cache. what can I say. though the drives are not full. these people may have very slow large drives.
I'm running a Drobo 5D with 2 drive redundancy thru a Thunderbolt connection. I had one WD 2TB drive go bad on me, inserted a new 2TB drive, and it took about 6 hours for the rebuild. Same when I swapped some 2TB drives for 6TB drives.
Disappointing to see that a lot of people still don't seem to understand the difference between RAID and backups.
As for Drobo, well, i'm not a fan. In the event of a drive failure then all NAS's are going to need a similar process to rebuild and recover. The problem with Drobo is that they use a proprietory system of partioning and formatting. So in the event of the Drobo hardware failing, you only have one choice to get your data back - buy another Drobo. And in the event of a corruption that makes all data inaccessible, it is not possible to plug the drives into a Linux PC and use recovery utils. If you get one of the NAS's that runs a more standard Linux implementation, you have a lot more options when failure occurs.
for a single drive failure? I have updated drives (swapped out as if just like a failure) and it has taken hours but never days. in that time all my work has been totally accessible to use too.
