[X4U] Firewire Drive Recommendations?

[Neil Laubenthal]

Not to sound negative . . .because personally I find the idea behind  
the Drobo quite interesting . . .but I've seen a considerable number  
of reports of issues with them.

It's only anecdotal evidence . . .but I would guess it's running about  
3 really satisfied customers to 1 unsatisfied customer based on  
reading this list, the Tidbits list and a couple of other Mac oriented  
lists. The issue varies . . .but failure of a drive taking down the  
whole RAID and killing all of the data seems to be a common but not  
universal symptom.

Of course . . .there are a lot of other issues that can cause total  
failure of a RAID as well . . .and the same issues may affect other  
RAID brands . . .but I've seen it enough that I might not want to  
trust my backups to it at this point.

Between that and the additional price (500 for the empty unit) . .  
.perhaps a couple of stand alone 2 TB drives would be another thing to  
consider. These can either be RAIDed within Snow Leopard . . .or there  
are numerous free/low cost applications that will script a drive  
duplication so as to make an incremental backup of the backup drive  
once a day or something like that.

I agree with the Time Capsule . . . seems like a lot of issues with  
them and reliability isn't what it should be at this point.

The real key to backups is . . .of course . . .multiple ones. I don't  
bother with multiple backups of Time Machine . . .but my laptop drives  
get cloned periodically in addition to a separate drive and the really  
important stuff on my laptop gets script duped to a folder on my file  
server daily. My file server has Time Machine, scripted daily and  
weekly backups with versioning to both the internal and an external  
drive, and scripted weekly/daily backups with versioning on another  
machine (actually an old mini that is the Time Machine destination for  
the laptops as well as backing up the file server). In addition, there  
are Mozy (free version so only the really important stuff) and  
JungleDisk/Amazon S3 offsite backups of the file server share.


-- 
neil


Quoting Dave <69abel at gmail.com>:

> I'm going to add my vote to the Drobo. And I'm going to suggest   
> avoiding a Time Capsule. They are failing at an alarming rate, but   
> always out of warranty (unless it is covered by AppleCare). The   
> power supplies are over-heating and dying according to the reports   
> I've read.
>
> Dave
>
> On 2010-02-08, at 19:15, Jens Selvig wrote:
>
>> I like the Drobo idea. Another might be to use an Airport Extreme   
>> Time Capsule.
>>
>> Jens
>
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