Drobo Issues: How Screwed Am I?

[kepardue]

So, we have a Drobo with 3 4tb drives and 2 2tb drives in it. One of the 4tb's failed. We ordered a replacement and have it, but we also ordered an 8TB external to back our data up on. I was hoping to have a copy of our data off of the drobo *before* I replaced the failed drive, and it was about ¾ of the way copied when suddenly the Drobo disappeared from finder.

Drobo Dashboard is still running. It's telling me that Data Protection is in Progress, but Disk Utility shows the drobo present but the partition grayed out (see attached). I suppose I should have immediately replaced the failed drive instead of try to make a backup copy, but here I am. Right now, my plan is to wait until the data protection is finished and then IMMEDIATELY replace the failed drive.

What are the odds that I'm going to be able to get my data back?

 

[matreya]

Judging from the graphic you've attached, I think it would be reasonable to assume that you can put the new 4TB drive into place, and it might improve the chances.

You should know now that you cannot rely on one device to store all your data... and always, always have up-to-date backups.

BTW, what brand HDDs did you use? Seagate?

From here https://myproducts.drobo.com/article/AA-01411 it says that the time taken to protect data depends on how many bad blocks a drive has, so I think it would improve time needed if it had a new drive to replace the one that's died...

Edit: Also checkout https://myproducts.drobo.com/article/AA-01742

 

[jeyf]

observe the hours remaining and see if it counts down. Count may not be linear.
main concern you might have is:
do you have the required open space on your drobo to re order the data?

relax; where drobo is not the fastest tool in the shed but it is reliable.

 

[brand]

If your data is important to you I dont understand why you wouldn't contact Data Robotics Support immediately rather than post on some forum on the Internet and wait.

Just wipe the array and recover all the data from your backup. Should be easy enough. If you don't have a backup consider this an important like lesson and start backing up your data.

 

[westrock2000]

Can a DROBO be used in JBOD mode? Meaning you get direct access to each drive? Or does the DROBO mask that from the user?

If you can get access to each drive, you might look at using OpenZFS file system which gives fantastic protection, but would allow you to move the drives out of the DROBO should it ever fail. I'm using OpenZFS with 10 drives connected to my Mac Pro (2 sets of 5 disc RAID 5 combined as one pool).

 

[urbanracer34]

Can a DROBO be used in JBOD mode? Meaning you get direct access to each drive? Or does the DROBO mask that from the user?

No. A Drobo does NOT have a JBOD MODE. Drobo masks it from the user, doing everything with its own proprietary RAID.