(image via wired - note, not a drobo.)
Maybe you don’t keep all your paintings on the computer, but as a photo (and more and more often, other digital media) based artist, I eat up hard drive space. It became apparent to me pretty quickly that if I was going to keep creating, and valued what I created at all, I’d need to find a way to handle long term storage.
As a side note, Burnable DVDs or CDs are NOT a backup system. Neither are external hard drives. They are both one level systems with extremely high failure rates. All it takes is one small drop, scratch, power surge, or relatively “minor” failure and you have no data. USB drives fail especially often. Every one. Even yours. Period. This used to be a PS at the end of this post, but it’s super important so I moved it up. Educate yo self!
The first point of this post is that a Drobo is not the way.
I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ve also recommended the Drobo product in the past. After lengthy use, I’m revoking my recommendation entirely.
Make some kind of home server out of an old shell or buy something that doesn’t use a proprietary data format. Yes, the little “storage robot” is easy, but it is also practically impossible to troubleshoot on your own. The Drobo worked (on and off), but once the warranty is out (and you can only renew – with paying – for three years), all they will tell you to do is buy a new one if your unit fails. Even if the failing unit hasn’t accidentally destroyed your data, the hard drives and all your data are useless until you give in and buy a new unit.
In the time before this final issue, it had a huge failure once that shut me down for 3 weeks while they got around to eventually sending me a new unit. Does that sound frustrating? Here’s a rant I just sent to my father about my most recent problems.
I’ve spent the past 29 hours (literally, ugh) working to restore my backups from my external backup unit, which is on the fritz. I’m having to use my old tower case to build a server (basically) to take all the data (all my art work and information [including my accounting backups, which is why I haven't gotten to that yet, bleh]) which I have to then transfer it to – however, I thought I could use the existing hardware infrastructure (at least the motherboard, power supply, case, dvd, proc, memory and hard drives, don’t really need the video card or sound, which I removed) but it turns out after this long process including trying 4 separate operating systems (fedora linux, puppy linux, windows xp, and windows home server) the motherboard is shot and won’t recognize the sata drives.
Which means I can’t access my data, since I have nothing to move it to, and I can’t leave the old backup device on for too long without losing my data (Drobo – don’t ever buy one, it’s not worth the proprietary format it keeps data in, which makes it unreadable everywhere else. If you’re looking for a home backup server, I softly recommend one running Windows Home Server, which is what I now need to set up myself, since everyone in the house needs to be able to use it and beth doesn’t dig linux.)
So. Basically the only thing salvageable from the 6 year old PC are the case, dvd rom drive (which I have to open with a paper clip since the little motor is lagging), and the power supply. The memory and processor are fine, but are too old to work with any motherboards available on the market under warranty, and it would be stupid to buy a used one and open up a new bag of problems. One hard drive seems usable, but it’s over 6 years old and I’m sure it’s not trustworthy. Since it’s so small, it’s not really worth keeping except as on hand emergency replacement.
At 29 hours in, I’ve realized I have to drop around 350 dollars for a legal version of Windows Home Server, new motherboard, memory, processor, and hard drives (ide for operating system, and sata for backup – I don’t really need another one for long term, but I’ve got to have another during the original transfer process, since I can’t pull any from the drobo until most of the data is off. ugh)
I’ve opened up my case to try and jury rig a hard drive on the outside of the case (no more room in it, but some spare connectors on the mobo) and backup data to there, which will hopefully mean I have something to do my bookkeeping on in the next few days, but I can’t even order the newegg order for the new parts until friday when I get paid.
This computer thing has been a known issue for a while, but monday was the first day I’ve had off in around 15 in a row to even try and fix it. I was hoping the hardware I had would work (the old system has been sitting in our storage for a while so I could use it for something like this eventually) but the mobo just has too many problems. Building another server inside the case will take more time than buying one on the market, but their cases are smaller and functionality limited, plus they go for around 600 – which is stupid when I’ve already got a case, power-supply, and once I free them from the Drobo, a bunch of storage drives.
sorry for the rant, I’m kinda exhausted.
So yeah. If glancing at that block of text makes you feel tired and frustrated, then you don’t even have to read it. That’s the jist of it – computer issues and then frustration. Granted, a lot of the time spent there has nothing to do with the Drobo, but if the damn thing worked I wouldn’t be trying to scrounge up old motherboards to slap together a linux server.
Basically, it’s a lot less expensive and less of a headache in the long run (plus you get sweet features like network access, backup systems, and media serving to wireless devices) to just build a small tower server and set it up with Amahi, Ubuntu, or Windows Home Server. When the damn thing dies (and it will), you can figure out what part to replace or at least access your drives.
I guess you could buy one of those little Windows Home Server boxes that they sell everywhere, but I really think it’s worth it to spend a little extra time and a lot less money to end up with something a lot more expandable and customizable (mine is gonna have 6 sata slots and 1 IDE, and can totally be used as a desktop computer for office work, even play some games.) The easiest option, I think, is to drop 100 bucks on Windows Home Server (cheap for a windows OS! Try the free trial.) Here’s a good checklist for setting up the server or seeing if you have the parts to try one out. Here’s a rundown on a custom built server out of spare parts, over at Vidmar.
If a free operating system sounds better to you, there are a lot of good linux alternatives. Amahi, one I liked a lot, is free, slick, and runs in Fedora – requires some linux knowledge, but it’s all out there on the internet. Almost all these set ups can run headless, so you don’t necessarily need a monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
All those wires might look very intimidating to some of you less technical arty types, but I’m sure you know someone who can show you the basics. You could just follow the directions that come with your oem hardware (it’s how I learned) or have someone help you out. They could just build the basic system for you, then for hardrives (increasing your storage) it’s as easy as LEGO once you know what you’re doing. Well, with a little more screwdriver, but that’s just to secure ‘em in the case.
If you are a photographer who knows how to make platinotypes (looking at a couple of you), you can figure this shit out.
I’m not expert on this stuff (I only worked in a computer repair shop for one year, back in the 2001, so I’m dreadfully behind on a lot of knowledge), but I’ve had to put a lot of time and research into it and hopefully you can gain a little from my (often negative) experiences.
This is super important for any digital artist (and seriously, don’t kid yourself, you are a digital artist if you are a photographer). You may not have 4tb of information from numerous sources, like data heavy video projects or huge ass film scans, but even your family photos and bookkeeping should have some data redundancy. It’s not that hard to add networked access and automatic backups to that idea, and it ends up being cheaper and less of a headache than going with one of those fancy proprietary external enclosures.
So that’s that.
Thomas Locke Hobbs comment on March 30, 2010 8:25 pm:
I think it’s important to have an offsite copy of your data in case your home ever burns down or is robbed. My personal system is to have 3 identical hard drives; a primary and secondary copy at home and a tertiary copy at a friend’s place. If you live in an earthquake prone city maybe you want that tertiary copy in another state.
Possibly apocryphal story: a friend worked late the night of Sept. 10, 2001 finishing up a programming project while on contract for Mercer, which had offices on high floors of the north tower of the World Trade Center. He slept late the next day and thus escaped the disaster. His programming project was stored on the company’s back-up servers, which were located in an office in the south tower.
Reply
Ian Aleksander Adams reply on March 30th, 2010 8:55 pm:
yeah, that’s the next step. Like in Windows Home Server, you just set it up to backup your drive shares to an external (or ftp) and then take that one copy with you to a safe location.
Not that it needs to be done as often, a couple times a month is more than enough for most people. But it’s so important to be able to have something in case of emergency.
Reply
Don’t Get a Drobo Build a Server « MS Windows Home Server Pingback on March 31, 2010 11:09 am:
[...] Ian’s post is available here. [...]
David Strohl comment on March 31, 2010 11:17 am:
i know very little about the subject, but my friend’s response: “Yea… it’s like that with any server rack though. If the drobo hardware fails you can just get another, pop the drives in, and it’s up and running again. If you have a raid set up you have to rebuild the raid exactly the same again and it has to be one that had redundancy. Though the replacement motherboard, processor, or whatever might be a little less expensive than a new drobo it’s not any easier. The cost of the drobo I have now is down to like $350 so for not having to deal with the headache of building an actual server it’s probably worth it. Really you just have to back up multiple places…”
Reply
Ian Aleksander Adams reply on March 31st, 2010 11:17 am:
Theoretically, if you believe their advertising, yes – if your drobo fails you just get another and pop the hard drives in (which I’ve done, and after a week of “rebuilding” it was accessible). Except, sometimes (and distressingly often to look at their forums) when they fail they take the data with them.There is no reason they should fail so often, though. And your warranty runs out in one year unless you keep paying for it, then it forcefully runs out in 3 – meaning you’re basically committing to buy a new one every three years.
And in the three years I’ve had mine, it’s failed many many times. Much more than the 6 years that I’ve had the computer beth was using.
Also, I’m not recommending raid – for the reasons he mentions. I’m recommending an internal or external backup system just using an automated process – so each of the drives can be read independently and never need to be in a specific order or set up. Building a server is much easier if you don’t care about raid. Windows Home Server basically does the same thing drobo does, but without a proprietary data format – makes many drives of different sizes work together for data redundancy.
Yes, you don’t get as much space for your money since they are 1 to 1, but in return you get much much much more ease of mind about your data.
Drobo just fails way too often and has way too few features to be worth it. For the 350 you can probably get the parts you need to build a sweet ass media server that also does a whole bunch of other shit that the drobo simply isn’t designed to do – aaaand can be repaired by any pc repair place, not just the drobo home office (which takes forever to do support.) The engineers are cool – I actually got the direct line for one eventually last time I had to deal with problems, but the actual support people take forever to get you to one, and 9 out of 10 the only way to “fix” your problem is a new unit. which isn’t a solution, really.
It’s not that the drobo is a bad concept (and the points you mention are exactly why I got one in the first place, and used to tell people to get one) but it’s badly implemented. Sometimes the “easy” things end up being much more of a headache, because when they don’t work, they just don’t work.
Reply
Ian Aleksander Adams reply on March 31st, 2010 1:19 pm:
Basically, raid is a bad idea for some of the same reasons that the drobo is. Although it’s a bit more accessable, the best situation would be that in the case of hardware failure, I can just grab one of the drives from the system and hook it up to any working computer and have acccess to my data that day.
No waiting for support, no waiting for a repair or a new unit to show up. If I have to buy a new part, I can use and protect my data in the meantime instead of pulling out my hair wondering if it was destroyed along with whatever other hardware failed.
That’s simply not possible with the drobo.
Reply
Nigel Jones comment on March 31, 2010 12:41 pm:
Hi,
Completely agree.
Ive been a linux user for years, grew up on *nix and have worked in a development environment with large enterprise SANs. I wanted to replicate that at home, but budget didn’t allow.
After outgrowing a Linkstation pro I decided to skip on proprietary raid and go for WHS. Whilst being windows based I did feel a little uncomfortable, in practice it’s worked solidly and been very fast. allowing for ad-hoc drive combinations & selected redundancy.
I do wish the “system” disk was mirrored, but apart from that very happy.
I went with a prebuilt HP EX490 for around 305 UKP. The only scary bit is there’s no console/graphical output. Good to discourage fiddling, not good when trying to decide whether to update the network driver….
Reply
Ian Aleksander Adams reply on March 31st, 2010 12:44 pm:
yeah, that’s why I decided to home build one – windows home server isn’t that bad of an operating system for basic tasks, even. You can run office on it no problem, for example. I’ve got plenty of spare keyboards and mice, so plugging a monitor in when I want to use it isn’t that big of a deal (especially since it’s under my desk next to my main workstation, which has two monitors.)
If you wanna mirror the system drive (though you shouldn’t really have to since I think everything on it that’s important can be fixed by doing a restore? Not sure) – the old windows backup system is still included in the OS. You should be able to use that to backup anything that physically exists on the drives. Might be hard to do with a forced headless system, though.
Reply
Ian Aleksander Adams reply on March 31st, 2010 12:45 pm:
actually, I’m sure it would work for a lot of non basic tasks as well. There’s a lot of plugins out there designed specifically for WHS, but it’s still windows at its core – which can run a shitton of programs.
Reply
Nigel Jones comment on March 31, 2010 12:56 pm:
I actually try to restrict the WHS box to what it’s meant for — that’s file serving, backup (including off-site backup), media streaming & a couple of other “always on” activities.
Since we have 3 other laptops, and 3 desktops I want the WHS to be stable, safe, and depended on by the family, so try to restrict experiments (not that I’m good at playing safe).
I did initially have > 1 month of glitches. Turns out it was a conflict between enabling file sensitivity (in Interix, the posix environment) and WHS/DE. Just don’t do it. 99.999 % of people probably don’e so wouldn’t get the minor corruption (just a few file attributes). I have a connect case open with MS and have confirmed the cause/effect.
Reply
Ian Aleksander Adams reply on March 31st, 2010 12:59 pm:
ah yeah, I just asked you about that on your blog, I think. Good to know.
yeah, honestly I won’t use it for those purposes because I want it to be as clean an operating environment as possible, but it’s very comforting to me to know that if I have to open and edit some of my backed up documents after my main computer has crashed (and if none of the laptops are home) I can do it on the server computer. Even if it’s just to find some numbers or upload a jpg in firefox or something.
For the most part, those always on activities are all its gonna do.
Reply
Nigel Jones comment on March 31, 2010 12:56 pm:
I should add, I meant “meant for” in terms of why *I* bought it — not trying to say others shouldn’t use it for whatever they like!
Reply
My current photographic to-buy list | the fabulous freak Pingback on July 6, 2010 1:55 pm:
[...] to automatically back them up to my online storage, and certainly not a Drobo: I tend to avoid solutions using proprietary formats. share [...]