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drobo s opions
- Thread starter dseelig
- Start date
Godfrey
Well-known member
I've only used a Drobo S at a client's place for a little bit and I didn't see a heck of a lot faster operation with his machine vs the Drobo he had prior.
But, possibly off-topic:
I don't see the point of using a Drobo as a Time Machine repository. I use a 500G standalone drive as my Time Machine volume for the 500G boot drive in my system. When it is full, I swap in another and create another Time Machine backup volume. When that one's full, I swap back to the first one, erase it, and create another Time Machine backup. And so on. I see no point to having an infinite number of backups, just enough to be sensibly secure for three to five months or so. Two 500G drives are so cheap these days it is easy to manage.
My photographic data files are on a 1T mirrored RAID data-only volume, soon to be 2T, which is doubly backed up and archived separate from Time Machine. I'd like to get a Drobo for the data-only volume as it would be less risky and expandable for more capacity more easily. I've not seen any issues with speed for this use, based on the performance of the client setups I've created using the standard Drobo with FW800.
Godfrey
Well-known member
I didn't mean to imply that you didn't need storage space*for backup. I just don't know why you're using a Drobo as a Time Machine backup.
Time Machine isn't best for in backing up image files, particularly image files that are edited a lot, as it is an incremental-tiered backup system. Every time you make a small change to a large file, it will write another copy to the backup so that you can retrieve older versions. I don't need older versions of my renderings ... I only need to keep the latest version synchronized to a backup. So I don't include my image files in a Time Machine backup, I use a separate backup/archiving solution which does file replacement/synchronization rather than an incremental-tiered backup strategy for them. It saves a lot of space in the backup and is more efficient as well.
For your needs, with that much data, I wouldn't bother with a Drobo S ... I'd go to a Drobo Pro and populate it with 8 2T drives, make it the *working* repository. I'd create a Time Machine backup drive that excluded all the image files and did the incremental job on your email, paperwork, financial records, client billings, etc.
Time Machine is a great solution, but it's far more suitable for lots of small files for which you need an audit trail than for handling large files for which you only need the latest revision.