Thursday, July 08, 2010

Can You Restore?

Last Sunday, I lost the hard drive that contained the upcomging book - everything - images, portraits, texts, even the list of photographers. Fortunately I use a combination of Time Machine and a redundant array Drobo 4X 1 terabyte backup system. Although it took 24 hours to restore all 500 gig. from the lost drive, it came through perfectly. This morning, my fourth drive on the Drobo gave up the ghost, but since the backup is redundant, I simply pulled out the drive and plugged in a spare one, which happened to be twice the size of the other three, no fuss, no muss, nothing lost. It will be a day or two before the new drive is loaded and the redundancy back in force but it doesn't get much more painless than this.

Three cheers for Time Machine and Drobo.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just a question because I'm interested in Drobo too.

Do you use Drobo to store the TimeMachine backup?

Tim Gray said...

Not so lucky here. My Drobo suffered from a master file table corruption. I was able to run a commercial recovery utility and got back most, but not all of my content. Drobo mitigates individual disk drive failure, but that redundancy shouldn't be considered data back up.

George Barr said...

I do use Drobo as the Time Machine backup "drive", which has it's own redundancy, Tim's comment noted.

George

George Barr said...

I would never store information in Drobo, rather use it as the place to put your backup files.

George

Joe Lipka said...

Oh man. The perils of the information age. Glad you were able to survive this.

Sandy Wilson said...

What a nightmare to have this happen. However we all know that the only reliable thing about computers is "THEY ARE NOT RELIABE".