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!