Drobo Point of Failure?

I am considering moving from the multiple external hard drives to a drobo. I know it provides great fail over for when a drive goes. But, what happens with the drobo itself goes? Is there any sort of health check it does? How hard is it to take those drives out of the drobo and get data off of them?

I've been burned in the past in a network server environment with a raid cluster which was inaccessible because the raid controller died.

As far as I know, only a Drobo can understand the data on the drives. But if your Drobo fails, you can stick your drives in another Drobo and it will see your data. No RAID system is a replacement for proper backups.

I made a somewhat similar choice. I went with a Mediasonic HF2-SU3S2, which is a non raid enclosure. I grew tired of having several individual Rosewill drive enclosures. The good thing is, if the Mediasonic does fail, I can easily insert any of the drives into my individual enclosures temporarily, until I replace the Mediasonic.

I would be wary of using the Drobo as my sole backup, if that is what you had in mind. If you were planning on using the Drobo with an additional external drive(s) then that would be different. But I have seen to many people believe that RAID = multiple backups.

I have a Drobo S. Yes, only a Drobo can read the disks. I also have an eSATA dock where I periodically (once a week), back up everything using SyncToy. On the Drobo, I keep all my images, plus an image of my C: drive (Acronis). The drive image does not end up on the external drive. I pull the drive out and it stays at work. So, once a week I have to bring the external from work and back again.

I have RAID1 C: AND D: drives, also. I may unraid the D...haven't made a final decision.

You might want to look at some online storage services such as Amazon S3 or Mozy.

That or if you want to do in house backups tape rotation is the only way to go.

http://aws.amazon.com/​s3/
http://www.mozy.com

isoMorphic wrote in post #11262730
You might want to look at some online storage services such as Amazon S3 or Mozy.

That or if you want to do in house backups tape rotation is the only way to go.

http://aws.amazon.com/​s3/
http://www.mozy.com

This is a good method to use, tape can be slow, but it's more reliable.

The first solution would cost me over $56/month + around $40 for the initial upload.

The second, it would take about 50 days/24hrs per day to upload my library based on their bandwidth and about 24-48 hrs to upload a typical shoot. Base on their numbers. I imagine, in reality, it would take longer.