Hi All,

New here, nice place you've got!

I have a question re extrenal HDD and back-up. I am a Leopard user on an iMac 24". Time Machine backs up too a noisy and old 500GB Maxtor - it's full and the noise makes me nervous (though I guess it's just the fan).

I would like to buy a new drive.

I was originally looking at just a 1TB drive.

Then I discovered the world of RAID1. Still tossing up the pro's and cons of building one vs the new 2TB My Book, which is about the same cost as building yourself & also has a 5yr warranty!

Then I discovered DROBO! Wow ... nice ... my main question is this: If I bought a DROBO, does it behave like Time Machine (i.e. it's own software etc) or do I run Time Machine with the DROBO as the target drive? - Hope that's clear???

It's all just for photos and music but I have a decent amount and am paranoid!

Thanks,
Shane.

Drobos are excellent External Drive Enclosures, and using one will backup your stuff just as your current Maxtor does now, only not so noisily.

For simplified info on how stuff works - see here - and for a squizz at other external drives and what they offer - see here.

Also - see here for a nice creamy simplified look a an explanation of RAID.

As to Time Machine, I myself am just as paranoid, and personally still prefer SuperDuper! as the clean alternative.

Call me un-mac...

cheers,

cw

Drobo isn't a substitute or replacement for time machine.

It's a RAID storage solution that removes a lot of the headaches and technicalities associated with such so that the common user can enjoy the benefits of RAID technology with some semblance of simplicity.

Thus you would need to designate the Drobo, or one of its partitions, as the Time Machine target drive.

Hey thanks for the quick replies! Drobo actually have a Time Machine section on their page that I didn't see before (apologies) that says it is 100% compatible. I guess the obvious drawback is the expense ... and the fact it's version 1 ... i.e. it'll likely be better and cheaper next year... still, that's an endless cycle I suppose.

Thanks for the links too!

When I can get it working...

I plan on using a Mirrored RAID through Disk Util (so yes a software RAID - Booo) but a mirrored RAID and have the volume as my Time Machine drive to kinda help the redundancy.

Could I do this? ... Buy a simple enclosure for a 1TB drive and make this the target drive for Time Machine Back up. Then use my existing Maxtor 500Gb and iMac 250Gb as my storage? Would Time Machine backup data from both the 250 & 500 drives?

This sounds like a pretty OK interim solution? - Could even get an ultra cheap new case for the Maxtor to keep the noise down!

The Drobo people are wrong in claiming their product is Time Machine compatible.

Yes, it is possible to change a setting in 10.5 with a defaultswrite command to enable Time Machine to use a network storage device for TM backups. However, Apple have this feature disabled for a reason -- if there is an unresolvable packet collision or the network connection otherwise fails during a write to the Time Machine sparseimage -- even for a fraction of a second -- the TIme Machine archive becomes corrupt, unless Time Machine receives the proprietry bad packet retry command.

The only non-local devices which officially support the full Time Machine spec are the Time Capsule, Mac OS X Server 10.5.2+, and oddly enough, Windows Home Server.

Ohhh, well I certainly wouldn't want an unresolvable packet collision!

OK... Well it may just be best to direct TM to back-up the iMac HDD to the new 1000Gb drive. I could move all the data that's clogging the iMac HDD to the old 500Gb external HDD and then schedule a back-up using the regular back-up programme for the data from the 500 to the 1000. Sensible?

Thanks again!

Could you share the syntax of the defaultswrite command? I'm thinking I can live with the risk to at least have a backup of my Air. iMAC backs up to a firewire connected 1TB drive so it's safe but I've got nothing on the Air and having a network option so the thing is backing up when my wife is using it and she's not even aware it IS backing up would be great.

But Drobo has USB so it just acts like a normal external HDD with Time Machine. I didn't think that the OP was asking about network storage, but rather if Drobo worked with Time Machine, which I thought it did.

True - the OP was not asking about network storage - Brains brought it up. I simply googled drobo and time machine looking to see if using TM and Droboshare could be made to work. Drobo doesn't support it but their support indicated that they have heard of people doing this. Droboshare is buried in the basement - out of sight out of mind. Brains comment was the most promising hit I got when I googled to try and find out how to do this. I'm fairly new to the Mac world - haven't done anything with the command line. Just looking for some help.

@Zack:

This might not be the best place to search for help regarding the Drobo. It retails for around AUS$700 here and that's before you put any drives in it. Add on another $300 for the DroboShare utility and you've got yourself a $1000 solution with no storage capacity.

So, in short, very few people have them in Australia and you're therefore unlikely to get any real world feedback.

And also a 2nd Leopard machine. e.g. in a network, with file sharing switched on, and external hard disks attached.