Saturday, August 22, 2009

Drobo

After a little hiatus I’m back!

For those of you that know me or have read this blog you know that I preach Back Up Back Up and Back Up again your photos. Like most things today hard drives will fail.

The other day I was shutting down my system and my main hard drive that I keep most of my images on would not power down. The next day when I turned on my computer I got an error message about the drive. I still wouldn’t power down. The computer wouldn’t recognize it. That’s when I got a big lump in my throat and hoped for the best. I physically unplugged the drive to get it to power down. Waited a few minutes than plugged it back in. The drive started acting normal again and the computer was able to see it! Close one.

Now I did have all my data backed up onto another drive so if it totally bit the dust I wouldn’t have lost everything, but still scary.

So knowing that both my drives were getting up in years and also that once a drive starts acting funny it usually doesn’t fix its self I went ahead and ordered a Drobo. What’s a Drobo? It’s a data robot. What’s a data robot? I won’t get to technical but it’s a device that holds multiple hard drives and backs up your data between them. If a drive fails you just install a new hard drive and it automatically fixes its self and backs up your data. Check them out at http://drobo.com/

I went with the 2 terabyte model. I figure I can increase my storage as needed. And with the price of storage constantly dropping it won’t be long before my Drobo gets some new hard drives to back up my images.
I ordered mine from B&H http://www.bhphotovideo.com/ because they have good service and prices and they had free shipping. When it arrives I will post how