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.

Here’s what the main issue boils down to. One of the ways that the Drobo is able to expand over time is by presenting the OS with a virtualized volume of its total achievable space. So if you format your drobo drive as a 16 TB drive, (the current maximum except for on the Drobo Pro which is 32 TB) the OS thinks that it has 16TB of storage available. Thus, every program you use also sees the drive as a 16TB volume. This is true even if you have a single 250 gig drive in the drobo.

When you’re manually adding files to the drobo, this is not too big of a deal. You’re interacting with the drive and if you start to get close to filling the Drobo it will start to warn you both through the lights on the drive as well as the Drobo Dashboard software. It’s kind of hard to miss, and can actually get kind of annoying if you just try to ignore the warnings.

However, in our case we don’t often interact with the Drobo directly. It’s used as a backup drive for one of our edit suites and sits in a back room attached to a server. Every 3 hours our Retrospect server runs a script to clone all active projects to the drobo. In doing this we’re protected against any failures and at most would only lose 3 hours of work (which could still be a lot, but better than 3 months of work).

We just finished a good long stretch of having projects back to back without time to offload the complete ones, so the “active projects” folder started to grow beyond the size of the Drobo’s capacity. Because Retrospect thought there was 16TB of space, it just kept trying to pile the files onto the drive until the drobo finally crashed. It unmounted itself from the computer and no amount of restarting of the server and/or Drobo would bring it back.

In this case the Drobo volume gets so overloaded with files that it has no “work space” left to do it’s own housekeeping to keep track of used and unused space, as well as file redundancy. It needs a small amount of it’s own space to do this..

You might think that since it’s a space issue you can just replace one of the drives with a larger one and let it rebuild. Nope, that doesn’t work either. I was on the phone with Tech Support for about 20 minutes as we walked through the situation and finally he informed me that if I was sure that the drive had been filled beyond its capacity than there was nothing to do other than to start over and reformat the drives.

Wow! The drive system that’s touted as the safe way to store all of your most important files has one major flaw, and most people are not even aware of it!

While on my tech support call I asked the engineer how frequently he received calls about this particular problem. After a big sigh he admitted that it was nearly every day.

For us, losing the drive was not a huge issue. It was only a clone of one of the edit rooms and could be rebuilt overnight by just re-running the backup (with fewer files selected this time). But what if this was your primary repository for something important? What if it’s the one place you keep all of your work files, photos, music or something else that’s of great importance to you? I have a Drobo at home that I use as my primary holding tank for all digital video that I shoot of my twin boys, which is all tapeless media. If it had been that drive that went down in this same way I’m pretty sure I would not have been so easy going on the phone.

When to be Scared
How do you know if this has happened to you? To be totally sure you should go through Drobo tech support, but I’ll explain what usually happens.

You’ll find that the drive is not mounted on the desktop and doesn’t show up in the drobo dashboard. Even after a restart of the computer and the drobo it will not show up.

To verify it’s not the Drobo hardware, power down the unit, take out all of the hard drives and then plug it back in (with it connected tot he computer). If with all of the drives out it is able to be seen by the Drobo Dashboard software, then you’ve verified that the Drobo itself is working fine.

Next, with the cover off the front of the drive, unplug the drive (reinstall the drives if you have pulled them out) and plug it back in while watching the lights on the front (the lights along the bottom of the Drobo). There are two sequences of lights as the Drobo first powers up. It starts by building lights from left to right, until the row of blue dots are all lit. This is the boot up sequence of the drobo (which is actually running a version of linix, so yes it really is a mini-computer).

Next, all of the blue lights along the bottom will go out and then start to build from right to left. During this process the Drobo is evaluating the drives and determining where the extra space is on each drive and reading other information that it needs. This process normally completes and the Drobo mounts. In my case, the lights never finished building and it would hang every time, 3 lights before completing. Even after leaving it on for a few days it didn’t make any more progress. This is almost surly a bad sign.

So, what to do?

If this has already happened to you, there’s not much you can do (again, make sure you go through Drobo tech support to be 100% sure). The usual procedure is to power up while holding in the reset button in the back with a paperclip. This will reset the Drobo back to it’s “out of the box” state and allow you to format the drives again.

The good thing is that since you’re now aware of this problem there are a few ways to avoid the problem in the first place.

The Easy Answer

When the drobo dashboard tells you to replace a drive, or you see a yellow or red light flashing next to one of the drives, REPLACE THE DRIVE! Don’t mess around! I know I’ll take this warning a lot more serious in the future.

The Easy Answer, But With A Trade Off
When you first start to build your drobo, format it through the drobo dashboard but instead of just going to 16TB, set the size to the size your drive will be after formatted with the you plan to use. To figure out the total formatted size, you can use the online Drobolator.

The down side? Remember how you loved just adding drives without formatting and just expanding your storage space? You can’t do that anymore. Every time that you install a new drive you will need to reformat the drive to realize the additional space.

The Pain In The Ass Answer.

Format the drive as you would normally do using the Drobo Dashboard software, and go to the maximum of 16TB.

Once this is done, you need to open the drive in Apple’s Disk Utility program and repartition the drive to create a volume that is just slightly LESS than the available space that you see in the drobo dashboard.

For example, in my case I have (2) 2 TB drives, and (2) 1 TB drives installed. Once formatted it gives me a total available space of 3.6 TB

But in the finder this drive is showing up as having almost 16TB of space. Remember, this is what causes the problem.

Inside of Disk Utility you need to change this drive from one partition to 2 as shown here.

Set the first partition to just smaller than the maximum amount of free space that you have. In my case it said I had 3.6 TB, so I have made this volume 3.5 TB. In doing so I’ve just prevented the drive from being able to be overloaded. The Finder/OS will now know what the proper amount of space available is.

On the extra partition, just set it as “Free Space”. This will allow you to still expand your drive later as you upgrade the drives on your Drobo.

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.

Just for the record I have NOT used disk utility to do this step (I use iPartition) but it should work in theory. Test at your own risk!

SIDE NOTE
While the official word from Drobo is that pretty much any SATA drive will work, in my experience using Hitachi drives can cause heat issues once you get 4 drives in the case. My Drobo at home is a original USB version and I’m constantly having issues with it shutting down due to overheating, even though the ambient temperature is only upper 60’s to mid 70’s. I’ve been told by tech support that Hitachi drives are known to run a bit hotter. I guess I wouldn’t disagree with that.

The better choice would be the Western Digital Green drives. They’re a good balance of performance, energy usage and heat, and they’ve never given me a problem. The latest 2TB versions of these drives have really come down to a nice price and are well worth it.

The SuiteTake?
Even with the Drobo, it’s still a good idea to have more than one copy of your data. As a rule of thumb I try to always have 2 on-site copies and one off site “cloud” copy of anything that I can’t bear to lose. In this digital age it seems we have fewer and fewer tangible objects, and it doesn’t take much to lose a great deal.

The Drobo is a great technology and offers expandability and protection that other consumer drives just can’t match. But make sure you’re aware of the downside of not tending to the drives needs in a timely manner, or next thing you know you’ll be looking for a paperclip to push in that little reset button while holding back the tears.

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.

A Brief History – The Wrong Way
From 2002-2007 we used a hard drive backup system at our office that was working OK, but was starting to show signs of fatigue. With about 45 drives on the shelf (300-400 gigs each), some of the drives were 5 years old now and on occasion we would have problems retrieving files on some of the older drives.

There has been plenty written about the expected life of hard drives, the need to exercise them and the amount of time they will last on a shelf without regular use. No matter which side you’re on or what your personal belief is, I can tell you from first hand experience that we were losing data and I was getting very concerned. What use is a backup system that slowly loses its files over such a short period of time.

Back in April 2007 I went to NAB in part to find a new backup strategy (and in part to just relax in the hotel spa). After looking at plenty of solutions and talking to plenty of vendors, I came across the LTO A-Series drives from Quantum. It had some really great features that nobody else offered at the time, and was targeted to post production professionals. Some of the features include…

• Built on the LTO-3 standard, you could fit 400 gigs of storage per tape (tapes were about $50 each at the time, and even cheaper now).
• It was network accessible over Gigabit Ethernet. If you have multiple edit systems like we do, this is pretty big. You can park the machine anywhere on the network and access it from any local machine. With other solutions you have to move the drive from machine to machine as needed.
• No special software needed – using a standard FTP client or their built in web browser client you could backup and retrieve files with ease. It’s truly platform independent.
• The drive was based on the LTO open standard (there was also a SDLT version if you prefer). The two main benefits of this are that it’s an open standard that was created by Seagate, HP and IBM and the tapes have a 30 year shelf life.
• Each tape has it’s own built-in file system on the tape, so loading the tape directory and locating a file is fast and very responsive. No need to have a separate catalog file that you have to keep track of.

Implementing the A-Series Solution
The drive was not shipping at the time, but would be later that year. I patiently waited and in the fall of 2007 purchased the desktop version of the A-Series and a case of tapes.

This is where I’m supposed to tell you that everything went smoothly and rainbows were flowing out of the tape drive. Well, that was not the case. I’ll spare you the particulars and just say it took us almost 6 months, countless emails to tech support and a major software/firmware update to finally trust the drive with the long term safety of our projects. To their credit, the Quantum support staff and engineers were first rate in the way they responded to each and every problem we had. As annoying as I’m sure we were, they never made us feel we were any trouble even when we sometimes lost our patience.

In early 2008 they released a major software/firmware update that addressed 99.9% of our issues, and since then it has been smooth sailing. We have not had a single issue with archiving or retrieving elements and have found ways to turn the drive into a new revenue stream as well.

The Future is NOW (or at least very soon)
So here we are approaching another NAB, 2 years after my first introduction to the Quantum A-Series drive, and it just got better. I’m so excited and impressed with what’s coming out that I’m considering selling my current A-Series drive and buying the newer model. But, the new drives are not from Quantum. They’re from Cache-A.

Cache-A is a new startup company that has licensed the A-Series technology from Quantum so that they could build on the platform that Quantum created. They have some of the key players that helped create the original drive, and some seriously good people that have really thought through how to improve the new drive. Much of their feature list no doubt comes from feedback from the current customer base.

Here are the highlights of the new drives from Cache-A.

• The new drives are all based on the LTO-4 standard. This is huge, because now each tape can hold 800 gigs, double of the LTO-3 model from Quantum. That brings the price down to about 6¢ per gig. Wow!
• The drive is backwards compatible, and can read any LTO-3 tapes created with the Quantum A-Series drives. This is very smart, because it means upgrading from the previous model is very easy.
• The file system on each tape is now an open standard, which was not true before. This means that you can exchange a tape with anybody who has a standard LTO-4 drive. In the past, you both needed to have a A-Series drive to read the content. This was one of my biggest concerns with this solution originally, and it’s nice to see it has been fixed. No need to be that proprietary.
• The file system supports original metadata from source files, and they’ve made it clear they are adding to this support in the future.

I have requested an evaluation unit once they’re shipping, and if I get my hands on one I’ll do a follow up hands on review of the drive. For the previous review that Scott Roberts did on the Quantum A-Series drive we currently own, check out his post.

Looking a little further down the road, there are plans for the LTO format to progress with LTO-5 and LTO-6. LTO-5 will have a capacity of 1.6 TB per tape, and LTO-6 will hold 3.2 TB per tape. Time will tell if the technology continues down this path, but so far history has proven this format to be very robust and successful.

The Workflow
So how do we use the drive in our post production work flow? Here are the broad strokes.

Deciding What/When To Archive
All editing projects are archived to tape once the project has been complete and unchanged for 3 months or longer. It’s usually flagged for backup right around the 3 month mark by the primary editor on the project after conferring with the client. The backup will include all elements in the job (with the exception of digitized or imported original camera media) as well as a final master QT export of the project in it’s original format. If the client would like to include original camera media, we will do so for an extra charge based on the amount of space they need. This process is quick and easy since all projects use the project folder system I outlined in a previous post.

Once a project is marked for backup (by using colored labels in the Finder) it is moved into a folder called “Archive-Projects”. On the first of every month our assistant editor Scott goes to each edit system, verifies that each project has a master export, and creates backup folders that each contain roughly 400 gigs of files. We’ve found from experience that pre-organizing the folders/files in the finder prior to backup works much better then trying to do it all during the transfer process.

Performing The Backup
At this point it’s a matter of putting a blank tape in the drive and logging into the drive using your standard web browser. Using the client side software through the web browser you start the transfer by a simple drag and drop.

It takes roughly 3 to 3.5 hours to fill a 400 gig tape, but since this can run in the background it’s no problem to continue working on the computer. Once the transfer is complete, you get a confirmation message telling you that everything was successful, or a list of any problems that occurred during the backup process.

Once the projects are all successfully archived (as verified by Scott), he then turns the folders another color, indicating to me that the projects are safely archived and ready to be removed. Where removing projects is concerned, I’m a bit of a control freak and prefer that I’m the only one that deletes project folders and media. If a mistake is ever made and something is deleted by accident, I would rather be mad at myself.

Removing All Project Assets With A Simple Search
For the last part of this process I sit at the edit computer and load all of the media drives in the office (we have 2 raid systems totaling 20 TB of space, but a few years ago we had several G-Raid drives on each system). Using the job number from each job that has been archived, I do a file search for any and all files related to that job number across all drives. By doing this, I am able to not only delete the project folder, but all render files, capture scratch, project archives and so on. Once I have them all in the same window I give them a quick review – and then select them all and delete them. I then move onto the next project and repeat the step.

Keeping It Accessible
You may be wondering how we find files once they’re on the tapes. After all, we have over 25 tapes now and finding a single QT movie would be a nightmare without some sort of system in place. Well that’s the final step.

As each tape is filled, we mount it on the desktop of the computer and use a program called CD Finder to create a catalog file of all contents of the tape. This usually only takes a few minutes per tape. Once complete, the tape is in the CD Finder database and can be searched from any computer in the office without the tape being loaded. Once we find what we’re looking for, we load the appropriate tape and retrieve the files. It has turned out to be a great system.

The Payoff
So in the end, we have all of our important files backed up and safe for the next 30 years, they’re cataloged in a way that allows us to find a file in minutes, sometimes seconds, and we’ve made a small profit along the way by charging for the backup process and tape stock used. What started out as just pure overhead has turned into a income stream.

The SuiteTake
The amount of digital media attached to any single post production project is growing leaps and bounds at an alarming rate. Only a few years back having 1TB of storage per edit system seemed like a bottomless pit, and now we have 10TB per machine and at times are running low on space. The list of files to archive keeps growing, and if your workflow has includes tapeless media you have probably already been pushed to the limit.

One way to stay on top of managing your space is to do regular archives to a safe format that not only frees up drive space for new projects, but gives you peace of mind that all past projects are there when you need them.

As much as everybody wants to move away from tape, I still believe when it comes to reliability, cost per gig and shelf life, there’s still nothing better out there to archive your data. And I have literally put my money and company behind that belief. If you’ve been looking for a long term backup solution, I highly suggest you check out the new line of drives from Cache-A. If you can’t see them at NAB, be sure to check out their website or call them directly for more information. You won’t meet a nicer bunch of guys interested in helping you out.

See For Yourself
As of this writing, prices have not been set yet but I’m hoping they’re in the same area (or cheaper) then what the Quantum drives were selling for, which was about $7K for a single drive unit. If you’re going to NAB, be sure to stop by and visit them at booth SL-9605.