Is there still live on this planet?

[Perseus]

 No posts since august 8, 2015 ... anyone here?

[Parfumeur]

Switched to QNAP... <g>

On Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 12:44 PM, Perseus <no....@party.ms> wrote:

 No posts since august 8, 2015 ... anyone here?

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-= Cß =-

[Alex Upton]

Still here... Hoping that some day a reasonably way to pull data off of drives from a drobo array is revealed... My drobo pro sits dead on a shelf after it suffered a drive failure mid-rebuild from a previous drive failure... Even with dual drive protection enabled... I loathe my drobo pro as the array sits with a bunch of valuable family pictures that were in process of being backed up to AWS but never made it... It really was the perfect failure storm...

On Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 12:44 PM, Perseus <no....@party.ms> wrote:

 No posts since august 8, 2015 ... anyone here?

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[binar...@gmail.com]

Just last week finished migrating away from our last Drobo. We are running Synology diskstations now.

[Dror]

Also migrated to synology after a drobo data loss. Luckily for me I managed to salvage the data - it involved taking the drobo apart...

Never again!

[Darryl]

I, too, moved to Synology. It's not quite as flexible as a Drobo, but it's more than good enough for me.

[Peter Silva]

I wrote the Linux drobo dashboard... Moved to qnap (running Debian) a few years ago...

On 19 Feb 2016 12:44 p.m., "Perseus" <no....@party.ms> wrote:

 No posts since august 8, 2015 ... anyone here?

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[Darryl]

If anyone wants to check out Synology:

Main page: https://www.synology.com

Support forums: https://forum.synology.com

More opinions can be found in /r/synology on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/synology

[Alejandro Mata S?nchez]

We still do Drobo recoveries ( with our software ) , with cases from all over the world, most of them are old and mostly the drives start failing and Drobo doesn't proactively notifies the user, until 2 or more drives start failing and it ends up being not able to rebuild and heal itself. Some other times the user re-initializes the Drobo in an attempt to repair it, and some other they  reformat it.

Overall, It is not a bad product, but it lacks the proper monitoring to tell the user to replace drives as soon as they start to fail. Additionally, being proprietary black box without the recovery tools doesn't help either.

But as any expert would say,, RAID is not a backup, so either way i wouldn't rely on just one solution for backing up or store all my data, that applies for Drobo or Synology or whatever solution you pick.

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ATTE.
Ing. Alejandro Mata Sánchez

[Parfumeur]

The issue is privacy and confidential financial & legal documents.

Simple, albeit time consuming end user software is available for most if not all other Unix based RAID.  Not Drobo.

-= Cß =-

[salsa...@yahoo.com]

I echo what Alejandro says. I have replaced‎ all my drives before the old ones failed. It was an opportunity to install larger drives at the same time. I also found one can shut down the Drobopro and remove the drives one by one to check the smart data using seatools or the Linux equivalent called Smartctl. Then you can see if any errors are On record and take action before failure.

Always make sure there is another line of defence, you can use a second drive array or multiple portable drives, whatever suites you. BUT I have a passionate dislike of tape - because you may find out too late that the tape backup has a problem. 

I've seen EMC and other Enterprise class arrays go down - no storage is perfect.

Temple

Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.

From: Alejandro Mata S?nchez Sent: Friday, 19 February 2016 10:22 PM To: drobo...@googlegroups.com Reply To: drobo...@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Is there still live on this planet?

[salsa...@yahoo.com]

Oh, don't mount or write anything to the drive if you use Smartctl or Seatools.

Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.

From: salsa...@yahoo.com Sent: Saturday, 20 February 2016 8:24 AM To: Alejandro Mata S?nchez; drobo...@googlegroups.com

[Darryl]

Products like Synology, drobo, and qnap are merely high-availability storage solutions -- they are NOT backup.

If you're not also backing up your storage arrays -- whatever they are -- you're just someone who's going to someday lose data.

[Parfumeur]

Agreed.  But in the early days, Drobo inferred that their special RAID had built in redundancies and safety, letting the user 'dream' he/she was safe. Indeed, it was even worse, in that when failure struck, there was no recovery.  It was snake oil.

What was worse, was their inferior power socket allowing the plug to wiggle and lose contact if the Drobo was moved ever so slightly. I don't want to get started.....  I'm still running one as a redundancy DAS.

On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 4:12 PM, Darryl <dar...@gmail.com> wrote:

Products like Synology, drobo, and qnap are merely high-availability storage solutions -- they are NOT backup.

If you're not also backing up your storage arrays -- whatever they are -- you're just someone who's going to someday lose data.

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-= Cß =-

[Peter Silva]

well, I use my RAID units as a backup... they are backups for local disks in my PC's in the house... in that usage, any raid unit (including drobo) is fine.  If the unit goes cablouie, you "recover" by just doing new full backups.

On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 4:12 PM, Darryl <dar...@gmail.com> wrote:

Products like Synology, drobo, and qnap are merely high-availability storage solutions -- they are NOT backup.

If you're not also backing up your storage arrays -- whatever they are -- you're just someone who's going to someday lose data.

[Malcolm J. Currie]

My replaced Drobo 2 from 2009 is still running remarkably but I'm
looking for a less risky solution for backups. After not using it in
write mode for 4 years probably helped.

On Sat, 20 Feb 2016, Peter Silva wrote:
> well, I use my RAID units as a backup... they are backups for local disks
> in my PC's in the house... in that usage, any raid unit (including drobo)
> is fine. If the unit goes cablouie, you "recover" by just doing new full
> backups.

I use RAID mirroring in case my main HD dies suddenly, but still want
backups of files, say if I accidently type "rm *" or want a version of a
file at some date. That's what the drobo is used for (with rdiff-backup).

Malcolm Currie

[Nick Rothwell]

Still rocking with a 4-bay Firewire/USB Drobo that’s getting on for a decade old. I think three or four disks have died over that time, all swapped out for replacements and re-synced. The last time was late last year when the Drobo’s PSU started to brownout, putting the Drobo into a long cycle of constant reboots (I was out of the country at the time, so this went on for a while); this killed one of the Seagate drives, but with a new PSU the Drobo is still ticking along.

This Drobo is plugged into 2006 MacBook Pro, offering network access, and which has a second dedicated drive for backups, and the MacBook and Time Machine are running constantly. (My limited experience with NAS devices is that the OS environment is impoverished; I like having the Drobo hanging directly off a machine I can SSH into and examine from a real, up-to-date OS. The Thecus NAS box I have here doesn’t support an up-to-date AppleShare protocol which is frustrating.) As has been discussed, the Drobo offers protection against a fair degree of hard drive failure (if a five day rsync time counts as “fair”), but it doesn’t offer backup. It could still get stolen, or I could accidentally, well, delete a filesystem. Boom.

My only real issue with it is that, with the MacBook offering network access, using it as a Time Machine backup volume is pathologically slow - a few gigabytes will take several days to back up, including “Preparing” and “Cleaning up” phases. But there’s little point in RAIDing backups anyway - better to just cycle between different single drives, IMHO.

— N.

[Malcolm J. Currie]

While doing a large backup in recent days the Drobo 2 (firmware Version
1.3.5) reached 97% full although the blue lights had three illuminated
which appeared to agree with df at 67% usage, so it caught me by
surprise. Yes I should have a "drobom view running". From my seat I
can't see the top pair of vertical lights. Bending down the top was red
and in agreement with what "drobom status" later reported. What made it
obvious was the slowness of the backup and then the tens of minutes for
an ls on a drobo directory to report.

What's the reason for the discrepancy? Ranjan Bagchi asked a similar
question in 2009. The answer then was that a LUN > 2TiB, since Ranjan
had 4 x 2TB, the blue lights become unreliable. However, here my
storage is 4 x 500 GB, i.e. less than 2 TiB. I'm using Linux Mint 17.1
fully updated.

Will I encounter known problems if I replace one of the 500 GB drives
with a 1TB, thereby exceeding the 2TiB, until I buy a replacement
NAS?

Thanks,

Malcolm Currie

[Peter Silva]

replacing one drive will not help, you need to replace two, one at a time.

The amount of ´reserve´ capacity needed to with a disk failure is the size of the largest disk.  before: the reserve capacity is 500GB.   After, the reserve capacity needed is 1TB (largest disk is bigger).  so you will gain nothing from replacing the first disk.  You still need to let it do it´s thing loading data onto the new disk.  When you add a second 1TB disk, then it will be a pure add... since it has all the spare capacity it needs, the second will grow the usable space by a full TB.

[Malcolm J. Currie]

> replacing one drive will not help, you need to replace two, one at a time.

Indeed. My point was that it would only take one change of HD to go
over the 2TiB threshold, if that were an issue. I didn't want to go
down that route if it would cause more problems, rather than deleting a
large directory from the backups on the Drobo, as it is now backed up
onto external drives (kept in more than one location).

> The amount of ´reserve´ capacity needed to with a disk failure is the size
> of the largest disk.

Yes this is eminently logical, and is the rule of thumb in the manual.
More-accurate numbers come from the Drobolator, although it no longer
has a 500GB drive in the menu. With 4x1TB then replacing two with 2TB
the capacity goes from 2.72 to 3.63TB, so not quite a full TB gained.
So wouldn't I only gain about 500GB of capacity if I add two 1TB drives
to my Drobo? 500GB is enough, so it's not a problem,

Thanks again for the drobo-utils Peter. They were very helpful today.

Malcolm Currie

[Malcolm J. Currie]

I have a partial answer to my questions. It's amazing what you can
forget after not using something for a few years. The FAQ on Page 27 of
he manual says that the capacity by default is presented as 2TB rather
than the actual usable space. I'm still puzzled by the blue lights
agreeing with df, so I'll keep reading...

Malcolm Currie

[Telejester]

Knocking furiously on wood, here's my two cents: 

I have two 1st Gen Drobos and 2 DroboPros which have never lost data for me. I hit them with compressed air every couple of months but otherwise ignore them until a drive dies or they fill up.

The 1st gens are only used for boring, non-performance-intensive backup.

The Pros serve multimedia over iSCSI.I explained in this list in 2010(!) how I configured them and that's how they run today except that over time I figured out how to keep them stable under iSCSI. The Pros have earned my trust and are treated as workhorses. Their only operational quirk is that when their iSCSI host is rebooted, they sometimes require a hard reset to start talking again. I've had many drives die over time and replaced them with no ill effects.

I have no idea if I'm lucky or if my usage pattern is suited to them somehow but I still like these units. It pains me to see people drift (or run) away.

[Nick Rothwell]

well, looks as if my 2nd Gen. Drobo has finally died after close to a decade’s continuous use - power light solid red, bay LEDs solid red, all blue capacity LEDs on, fan running but no disk spin up. Have tried USB and FW on two different machines.

It would be good to know if there’s some kind of hard reset, but if not, the unit has done me well, and the 3rd Gen. model is pretty cheap these days.

(I thought about some kind of NAS solution, but I don’t see how you’d back that up. With a USB Drobo I can hang it off an old MacBook, and then use Time Machine to back parts of it up to another disk.)

— N.

[Nick Rothwell]

On 10 Apr 2016, at 13:30, Nick Rothwell <ni...@cassiel.com> wrote:
> well, looks as if my 2nd Gen. Drobo has finally died after close to a decade’s continuous use - power light solid red, bay LEDs solid red, all blue capacity LEDs on, fan running but no disk spin up. Have tried USB and FW on two different machines.

Nope, the old guy seems fine, it’s the PSU that’s died. Misrepresenting in the eBay ad: the replacement “7W” PSU I bought to replace the original one was apparently only rated at 5W, and died a premature death. I’m now waiting for (I hope) a real 7W replacement.

— N.