When was the last time you did a backup of the data on your computer?
You haven’t?
Even if you have, here’s something that might interest you.
I have a family of external LaCie drives in the studio that has expanded to the point that, when I was considering more backup and archiving space in March, I thought there must be another option. I’d be buying two new drives, one to back up the other, taking my total of external drives to eight and increasing the amazing spaghetti junction of power units and firewire cables in the process.
Into the breach steps the Drobo from Drobo. [The company that produces the Drobo was formerly none as Data Robotics]. One box, one power unit, one cable, and up to 16TB of hard drive capacity! The unit connects via Firewire 800 and USB 2.0, and has four SATA hard drive bays which are extremely easy to populate – push the drive in and click. That’s it. The unit takes care of everything else.
Simply put, the Drobo backs itself up. It is based on a RAID system but with some smart improvements like it’s possible to use a combination of different size hard drives plus a drive can be removed/inserted while it’s running.
A quick look at the Drobo videos should give you a good understanding of this piece of kit and, if you want more, their website is very informative.
The initial outlay of the Drobo is a little pricey (currently available at Amazon for just under £400 plus drives) but, for the simplicity and low cost of expansion, space saving, and peace of mind, I feel it’s worth it.
I’m not getting rid of my LaCie’s though; the more disc space the merrier! Plus it’s always handy to have a bootable system disc copy for the Mac just in case.
Drobo have recently added the DroboPro to their line up; has slots for eight hard drives!
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