Here at ProfHacker, we do our best—as often as possible—to encourage our readers to regularly and systematically back up their files. All the joys of the digital world can quickly turn to horrors when a hard drive fails and takes with it a photo album, a set of course plans, or an article in progress.
I know this horror first hand. A few years ago, the hard drive in my Macbook failed—dramatically and suddenly. That hard drive took with it to the grave all the class plans I’d made for a new course and—most heartbreaking of all—the first chapter-and-a-half of the dissertation I’d just begun to write. At the time, we owned an external hard drive to use for backup, but I only connected my laptop to it occasionally, and Dropbox didn’t yet exist to automate such tasks. What’s more, our external harddrive started to fail as I attempted to recover the files I had backed up there.
After this experience, I resolved to better protect my data. As a first step, I replaced my external hard drive with a Drobo. What is a Drobo? This video will explain the Drobo more succinctly than I can:
Drobos provide two distinct advantages over standard external hard drives:
- They’re easy to expand. When you run out of space on your Drobo, you simply add a new internal hard drive to an empty drive bay, or replace the smallest drive with a larger one.
- They’re (relatively) immune from failure. Drobo automatically saves everything you add to it on more than one of its internal hard drives. Unlike in life, redundancy is a good thing for your data. So, when—when, not if—one drive fails, you simply pull it out and replace it with a new one. Drobo then autormatically restores the lost data from the redundant versions saved on its other internal drives. In other words, you can be sure (as one can be) that a sudden hard drive failure won’t destroy what you’ve backed up to your Drobo.
Of course, Drobo won’t protect your files if your house burns down. As we’ve said many times at ProfHacker, you should have a diverse backup plan that includes both local and remote storage. And there is another, potentially prohibitive drawback to the Drobo: price. Drobos are expensive–though the price depends greatly on which model you buy, they begin at $350 on Amazon. On top of that price, you also have to buy internal hard drives to populate the Drobo’s drive bays (though if you have a bunch of old desktop hard drives laying around, you can avoid this upfront cost).
For me, the investment was worth it. Drobo is incredibly easy to use: you just plug it in and let it work. I use SuperDuper to automatically backup my important files to the Drobo every night, but the Drobo can work just as well with Apple’s Time Machine and backup software on Windows or Linux. Even more important to me, however, is the security of the Drobo—I no longer worry that one epic hard drive failure will ruin a project (or, worse, destroy years of family photographs). Backing up to an external hard drive is good; backing up to two hard drives is better. Backing up to a data robot that handles that redundancy for you is better still.
Do you have a favorite piece of hardware for backup? How about a favorite piece of backup software? Tell us about it in the comments.
[Creative Commons licensed photo by Flickr user dnak.]
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33 Responses to Backup with D-R-O-B-O
bikegrrr - January 27, 2011 at 8:58 am
Dropbox.com is my favorite. Not only does it backup everything, I can work seamlessly from multiple computers and devices. I can even pull up a document on my iPhone.
garylynn - January 27, 2011 at 2:18 pm
I use AllWaySync to automatically backup my active files from my first internal hard drive to my second internal drive a half hour after the changes happen. Once a week I manually sync my second drive to my external USB drive. Whenever I get a round to it, I use Drive Snapshot to image my whole first drive to the external. The external drive I keep turned off unless backing up to it. And I replace all drives before their third year.
shawndenny - January 27, 2011 at 2:43 pm
Drobo may be a good solution for backup, but here at my university, we implemented it as a networked drive solution for both temporary and permanent storage. The powers in charge decided that the Drobo, being a redundant drive system would not need a backup. Unfortunately, the Drobo drives failed. All three of the redundant drives. The company sent replacements . . . and those redundant drives failed. All of this happened during the final weeks of school. Students who had stored content for class on the drive were unable to get to that content for their final projects. As such we were forced to move to another solution. Maybe on a personal level, this is an OK solution. I can’t speak to that. I can see how Drobo would possibly work as a backup drive solution just fine, but given our school’s experience. I would have a hard time investing in one myself.
drjeff - January 27, 2011 at 4:03 pm
I got a Buffalo Linkstation. They have a bigger fancier one they call the Terrastation. It’s basically a tiny file server with a decent-size hard drive built-in. (Works basically like Brobo with the optional base, Gigabit Ethernet ad all.) It has a web-browser control interface (no S/W to install), uses about 50 watts, and is the size of a medium hardcover book. You can plug two additional USB hard drives into it, for expansion or backup. I got a refurb’ed one for well under $100. I can use 1 USB slot for expansion, and the other for backup, which can then go off-site. It’s now about 2 years old, and works perfectly (so far).
Of course, it’s nowhere near as cool as Drobo. If cost were not so important, or if I were not so comfortable with the technology, Drobo would be an obvious choice. Considering what it does, and how well, the price is not really out of line.
bikegrrr – If your work in Dropbox is REALLY important, be sure you back it up, somewhere. Every so often, a web-based service dies suddenly, for whatever reason, leaving people stuck. Dropbox being so popular doesn’t guarantee it can’t happen to them — many of their users are “freeloading.”
drjeff - January 27, 2011 at 4:18 pm
shawndenny – Sounds like it wasn’t really the drives that failed. The odds of having that many drive failures so close together are less than those of winning the Powerball several times in a row.
But in any case, you underscore the very important point that you can NEVER count on one piece of equipment to not fail: anything that you can’t do without, you must have at least a backup, a spare, or at least a reasonable plan for what to do if it fails.
It’s reasonable to think that Drobo will fail a lot less than most file servers, but unreasonable to think it can’t fail. In this specific case, it’s only DRIVE failures that it’s built to mitigate. (FWIW, your problem sounds like probably a SATA controller failure, which fried the original drives, was mis-diagnosed, and then fried the replacement drives.)
Either your IT department violated that well-known and important rule, or whoever installed it learned why you should not do things like that without consulting with the IT department. There’s really no excuse for having lots of crucial files stored on only one device, no matter how reliable that device should be. Either way, your “Powers in Charge” are idiots. Don’t blame the machine; it’s only a machine (though a very cool one).
drjeff - January 27, 2011 at 4:24 pm
P.S. by “idiots,” I mean “reckless, ill-informed, short-sighted, credulous — maybe even gullible — and exhibiting a grotesque failure of imagination.” I hope this explanation keeps my previous post from getting censored.