I’ve spent the last couple of evenings trying to recover all the data on my iMac. Well, to be precise, my user home directory. I’ve been using a Drobo (2nd Gen) for the last 3 years as my backup drive, for both duplicates of the main drives (thanks SuperDuper!) and for Time Machine and it’s been very reliable. I always found the Drobo 2G to be very slow. Attached via FireWire 800, it never really showed any kind of performance. Max maybe 20MB/s. But I liked the simplicity. When they announced the Drobo 5D, with Thunderbolt and an SSD cache I figured it was time to upgrade. Having established that I could just transport the disk pack from the 2G to the 5D, I bit the bullet and purchased one from Amazon, along with a Crucial m4 256GB mSATA SSD cache.
During this process, I learned that the WD Green drives I had been using sucked. Very slow for those that are impatient, and were hampering the performance of the 5D. But otherwise, I was very happy. Drobo support recommended replacing with better drives.
Recoverit data recovery for mac and windows 8D: (Amazon) 5C/D: (Amazon) https://geni.us/FGhg8Backblaze. As part of new and better support for external drives, Backblaze now creates a '.bzvol' directory at the top level of every drive it backs up. Inside this hidden directory is a tiny file that identifies this hard drive for the rest of time. Carbon Copy Cloner and Drobo Copy. Remove the contents of.bzvol folder that has already been cloned. Drobo Products Drobo solves the three major storage challenges in one device – data protection, capacity adjustment, and ease of use. View More Drobo Solutions Learn More About Your Drobo View More Win a Drobo Enter your email address to join the world of Drobo Win a Drobo Enter your email address to.
Organizations around the world choose Backblaze to solve for their use cases while improving their cloud OpEx vs. Amazon S3 and others. Backup & Archive. Store securely to the cloud including safeguarding. Data on VMs, servers, NAS, and computers. Content Delivery. Backblaze is ranked 1st while Dropbox is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose Backblaze is: The default configuration includes everything except for system files to be backed up. That also includes external USB drives.
So I settled on WD Black. I swapped out a Green and replace with a Black and all was going well. I then attempted to do the same again a few weeks later, the intention being to do a rolling replacement of the Green drives with Blacks. After a short while, the Drobo dashboard was showing this newest replacement with a Warning. I raised a support case, generated diagnostics from Drobo Dashboard and waited for a response. The recommendation was to replace the new drive as it was timing out. Most likely damaged in transit I reckon. They also recommended replacing a specific one of the Green drives as it appeared to be malfunctioning also even though it hadn’t been directly showing a warning.
OK, I thought. I can ship back the faulty WD Black no problem (it was from Amazon). Then pretty much the worst thing possible happened. The WD Black was suddenly fully rejected or totally failed (I didn’t have time to figure out which) so the Drobo went into repair mode, moving data around to heal itself and recover some redundancy. At the same time, the dodgy Green drive also decided now would be a good time to fail!
Sharp intake of breath…
The Drobo just hung trying to talk to the second simultaneous drive failure. I only had single drive redundancy set, even though the 5D supports double drive redundancy. Rebooting the Drobo resulted in it just hanging attempting to talk to the failed Green drive.
All my backups and original data were on the Drobo. This is getting worse. A lot worse. Now, you might be thinking I’m completely stupid at this point. Not so fast! I also have been using Backblaze cloud backup for years too. The theory being that if the worst happens and my Mac is stolen or the house burns down, I’m still going to have everything. But now the $199 to get a USB drive shipped from Backblaze was looking expensive: I’d always figured the insurance company for the fire or theft would be covering that!!
Drobo Backblaze
Wait a second. I can request a Zip file of all my files with no size limit? Er…. OK. Let’s try that. A couple of days later, and thanks to 60Mb/s broadband (Virgin Media) I have all my files back. Not only that, I managed to get the Drobo up and running again (it took quite a bit of convincing to forget about the non-recoverable data on them) with the healthy drives and restored everything. And thanks to Amazon, I have a replacement WD Black in the Drobo for the failed drive that started all of this 24 hours after I reported it to them. Fingers crossed it stays healthy.
And guess what. I’ve enabled dual drive redundancy on the Drobo. I’m wanting to do all this again any time soon.
Backblaze Drobo 5n
P.S. The Internet is amazing