Time Machine... I love it. It backs everything up, keeps it organized by hour, day, week, month. It's great. The best thing is that I don't have to do anything to keep Time Machine working... uh, except for keeping a hard drive plugged into the computer that has enough room on it for all those backups.
This probably isn't an issue for many Mac users, unless they compulsively save every Youtube video they find online or take part in some other hard drive filling hobbies. For me, it is photos... which is what pays the bills. So at any given time, my basic MacPro backup is anywhere from 100-125gb depending (this is apps, music, and everything but photos) and then my photo drive is another 200-300gb depending (these are transmits and raw takes that have not been edited and moved into my archiving system yet.)
So that first Time Machine backup is about 400gb. Figure I'm using a 750gb drive and right there, I have filled 1/2 of the drive (roughly... I know that math is not one of my strengths). And from there I am able to fill the Time Machine drive up with amazing speed.
Each time I come back from a week long overseas shoot with 50-60gb of raw files... slurp... there goes another chunk of the drive... and you do that three or four times, along with the normal day to day backups and you have managed to fill up a 750gb drive in less than two months.
So then you go buy another hard drive (because I want to have a lasting backup system so that if I need to go back more than two months if I need to) and you start the process over again. First, it creates the giant backup that takes up a large chunk of the drive and then you watch the remaining space get smaller and smaller until it is time to repeat the process again.
Eventually you end up with a whole lot of drives and a bit of a headache from a backup/redundancy standpoint because in the unfortunate circumstance you need to go back to a backup to find something (and it happens... believe me) you then have to remember which disk (which two month chunk of time) the file or files are stored on.This is when I decided to take the plunge and try the Drobo. I had always thought the Drobo systems were pretty cool. If you don't know what a Drobo is, it is a RAID array that runs its self. You just have to put in up to four SATA drives (any size you want, they don't have to match) and plug it in to the firewire or usb port on your computer and it will do its thing from there.
It seemed like a perfect solution (you put a few 750gb drives in there and it'll last a long time since you won't have to keep re-doing that initial backup). Initially I was a bit concerned and kept going back to look at the backups and make sure that it was working and there weren't errors or problems... and there weren't. The Drobo was rock solid. The Mac would hang and I had to force it to restart, it would restart and Drobo was right there ready to work... unfazed by the shutdown.
One of the complaints that has floated around about the Drobo is that it is slow... when it was USB only, that might have been true, (I never tried the first version that was only USB) but the firewire 800 version is plenty fast. If I was editing video or doing something else that required lots and lots of extreme bandwidth, maybe I wouldn't be as happy. For Time Machine and the drive works great and is plenty fast.
The other thing that made Drobo attractive is that it is redundant backup. If one of the drives craps out in the array, you replace the drive and the Drobo will get you right back up to speed... with no data loss. Nothing nicer than having backups of your backups. Remember... redundancy. Drobo uses part of each drive to backup the other drives in the array automatically. It does all of this by its self. You don't have to do anything other that put data on it.
Here is another reason why redundancy is good. Before trying the Drobo, I tried using one of the Maxtor 2 terabyte drives (follow the link only so you know what NEVER to buy... there is a reason they are always on sale) and found out the hard way that when one of those drives fail (and it is two 1TB drives in an enclosure with a very cheap built in hardware raid solution) you have to send the whole thing back to Seagate and they send you a brand new drive and your data is gone. In my case, the drive shut down all of a sudden with about 500gb of data and would not mount again no matter what I did.
And when your data is gone, you might ask ... gone where? Good question. One they were not able to answer. They promised that they erase everything that comes back as a return, but were unable to answer the question of how many times they write over the data, etc. Plus, if you were counting on that backup... its gone. All of it. They ship you a new drive in a box and will not make any attempt to recover your data.
So with the Drobo it is fast, redundant, quiet and as simple to use as a regular external hard drive. It is the perfect Time Machine (or other backup progam) solution, in my opinion. If a drive fails, you replace the drive. It does not require sending anything back to Drobo unless the actual device fails, but from what I have seen, they are very reliable.
And then I started to compare the Drobo to my existing RAID system...
