All Posts Tagged With: "Post Production Backup"

The Dark Side of DROBO

August 21st, 2009 • Thomas Tomchak • Comments • Related • Filed Under


IMPORTANT NOTE: This post was updated on Wednesday; November 4, 2009 with new information regarding resizing partitions on the Drobo using iPartition.

As brought to my attention by reader Bradley Davidson (thanks Bradley), iPartition does not actually support the method that I mentioned, and neither does drobo directly.

In my testing, I performed the resizing operation on a newly formatted drive that didn’t have any data (since I had just lost all of my data that was on the drobo). If you try to resize a partition as outlined in this post, you WILL LOSE YOUR DATA. So don’t try it. In theory it was a great idea, but apparently this too will cause problems.

You can find more information on the iPartition website, as well as from Drobo. Like we’ve pointed out many times, we’re also learning here at SuiteTake so thanks for the feedback.

Before I start, let me just say that I am a Drobo fan. I have 2 of them (an original USB and a newer FW version) and plan to purchase more Drobo’s in the not too distant future. Overall I’ve had a great experience with the units and when I needed assistance their tech support was very helpful.

All of that being said, there is a dirty little secret that they don’t warn you about and if you’re not careful you can have your Drobo crash beyond recovery, which is what happened to me this past week. I lost nearly 4 TB of files and there was nothing I could do to get them back. If you own a Drobo, this is a must read.

NAB Preivew: Cache-A LTO-4 Archive Drive for Video Pros

April 6th, 2009 • Thomas Tomchak • Comments • Related • Filed Under

To those that know me it will come as no surprise that I’m a backup nerd. Since owning my first DAT drive in the mid 90’s that held a grand total of 2 gigs per tape (compressed) I’ve been interested in backup technology, redundancy and “playing it safe” when it comes to my data. That trend has been extended to my business for the benefit of my company as well as my clients.

This post will discuss a new backup appliance being introduced at NAB this year, and cover in general terms how we currently use its predecessor in our workflow. Even if you have your own method of archiving and don’t need anything at this time, you might want to read about our process toward the end of the post to see if you can benefit from it at all.