The Drobo is Officially Dead, Don't Trust Drobo With your Data

            Earlier today I realized that one of my 5 drobos was not being recognized by my computer.  After restarting the computer and still not being recognized I turned it on and off.  When I turned it back on all 5 drive bays went red and after a while it shut down.

When I tried to restart it I got this screen telling me to add a drive, even though all five drive bays were full.  I finally gave up and decided to just do a factory reset from Drobo Dashboard on the unit.  I keep two copies of every photo locally, and while this unit held every single unprocessed photo of mine from 2016-2021 (hundreds of thousands) it held them as a the backup copy.  The main photos are on another drobo.  

After resetting and restarting the unit it still would not recognize the drives in the unit.  I took those drives out and tried other drives.  The thing is simply dead.  I tried connecting it to a different computer, I tried just about everything.  It no longer recognizes hard drives period.  Which is fine, I'm only out the $800 or so that one of these things costs and I guess I'm without a back up between now and Wednesday when a new Synology DS1621+ arrives and I'll use the perfectly good drives from the dead drobo in that unit and rebuild my backups.  

I could buy another drobo but frankly I've sort of had it with them.  The units are very undependable and when you're trusting your photos, your most precious data of all to a metal box, you need it to work better than drobo and their high rates of failure.  This isn't my first drobo to go out.  I've had others go out too.  Or they can be quirky, all of a sudden the unit will just shut off because it happened to get hotter than 80 degrees in your studio.  It's not a big deal, you just have to wait for the unit 30 minutes or so to cool down and then plug it back in and restart it.  But when (on another unit) it starts happening every single day, it's time for something new.

I was already at the end of my rope with drobo after the last Mac update made all 5 of my units inoperable for a couple of weeks or so until Drobo/Apple could release a patch.  To make matters worse Drobo customer service wouldn't even tell people how long they would be without their drobos -- was it one week, two weeks, 17 weeks, four years?

Enough is enough.  Our pictures are important.

On the positive side of things I've heard really good things about synology.  Their ratings on Amazon seem favorable and beginning the great migration off of Drobo probably needed to happen at some point anyways.  I still have four remaining drobos but as they inevitably die, I'll probably continue migrating them out to the bookshelf where they serve as perfectly good dead weight bookends for my photography books.

This also serves as a good reminder for why with any system you want to keep at least 2 copies of every single photograph you have locally.  I also keep some additionally offsite and use Amazon Photos which if free with prime and allows unlimited photo storage including RAW originals.

And then Flickr is a backup of sorts too, I suppose, of my published work thus far in life, but I've always viewed Flickr more as photo sharing and less as photo storage.  It's a place to present your work to the world more than a place to hold your backup originals.

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Taken on: June 7, 2021

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drobo

synology

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