My Drobo Just Lost All My Data (Updated: It’s alive!)

So this morning I woke up and my first generation Drobo was acting funny. I rebooted it, and long story short when it came back it looks like the first 2TB partition, where all my data was stored, was gone, currupted, nuked, or otherwise unavailable. All my music, tagged over a period of months. All my videos, collected over years, and my collection of “classics” I’ve been making sure I get so that they are safe. All 13 seasons of Top Gear. All 40+ years of Doctor Who. All. Gone.

I’ve emailed off to Data Robotics, and I will gladly pay them the $100 (or hell, $500) support license I decided not to renew last year (because of course everything was going fine) if they can magically get it back for me.

Of course, if it does come back, will I now be able to trust the device? Or will I have to build a new system with another wack of disk space to act as a backup for that (blah blah best practices of course blah blah)? Or should I just dump the $1000+ worth of computer hardware and build another Linux box with RAID5 or buy a Windows Home Server box that does similar things.

I hate computers. Especially now as the Drobo was something that was rock solid and had had zero issues in the time I’ve had it. Data Robitics, or Cali Lewis, help me, you’re my only hope!

Seriously, this is completely bummed me out.

Update: After a few back and forths with Valorie at Data Robitics, and the end result of this being “just run the disk utillity”, plus running a couple of other mac data recovery bits, the Drobo seems to have righted itself somehow. It told me first it couldn’t recover anything, but after a bit more mucking around I suddenly noticed a “Storage1” (the name of the partition) sitting on my desktop. Drilling into it I could see my data, and drilling down farther I could (wait for it!) access my data!

Yay!

So now I’m frantically backing up, though I’m not sure if this really needs a backup or not. I’m also going to be picking up a 1 or 2 TB secondary backup tomorrow to have a backup for my backup, just in case. However, my data, my precious data appears (so far) be be alive. The backup is going to take about 5 hours it says, so we’ll see if it makes it through that without incident.

Yay!

5 Comments on “My Drobo Just Lost All My Data (Updated: It’s alive!)”

  1. I’m sorry for your loss, however when I researched the Drobo I was never fully convinced it was the Saviour of backup solutions. I store my archive (all 2TB of it) on my Mac Pro, Windows 7 and Drobo. Effectively if one of my systems go down, I’ll have two others to recover.
    Once again, I’m sorry to hear about your problem.

  2. Wow, dude that sucks but I guess you already knew that… I agree that it would be hard to trust a Drobo again.
    Seriously, why don’t you just go with Amazon’s S3? It’s not perfect but it does work really well and hardware failures are their problem, not yours. Another break in or a fire and you’re covered too.
    I still have all the Top Gear that you gave me so let me know if you need a copy.

  3. so hardware fail of the drobo, with multiple drives installed? if yes, wondering if you can simply swap the drives into new HW.

  4. To me a file server is not a backup. I’m in a similar boat as arc with all my data on a file server, but if there is a fire, theft, etc it would all would be gone.:( After some problems with my file server’s file system last week I think I”m going to get an extra TB drive and backup the large & ‘critical’ stuff on that monthly. I don’t need network access and if I’m feeling energetic a second one would work well for my off-site backup.:) I think I can get those for ~$100 each.