How to switch from Drobo to other NAS

[weezin]

I have a Drobo 5D that has served me (very) well for several years. With Drobo going out of business, and my 5D suddenly powering down once a few weeks ago, I'm getting skiddish.

I have a total of 15 TB of drives (3x4TB, 1x3TB) and have 1.5TB free according to the dashboard. So, I'm storing a lot of (important) data in that machine.

With this amount of data - how would I go about migrating to a different system? I assume I'd need to buy another NAS, another whole set of drives, hook both devices up, and then do a copy. How would I verify that all of my files made it over, uncorrupted, to the new system? I assume this would take a looooong time.

Any advice here is appreciated.

 

[Bigwaff]

With this amount of data - how would I go about migrating to a different system?

I’m sure your NAS vendor support site would probably have an article about migrating data from Drobo to their product. Probably via direct USB connection or via networking.

I assume I'd need to buy another NAS, another whole set of drives, hook both devices up, and then do a copy.

Yes.

How would I verify that all of my files made it over, uncorrupted, to the new system? I assume this would take a looooong time.

Do you trust all of your files are not corrupted on the Drobo? Garbage in, garbage out. I digress.

You basically want to checksum each file, copy, verify copy against the checksum. Something like Copy That (https://software.owc.com/copy-that/) would work (there are other programs as well) but the caveat is you would need to mount the Drobo and NAS device on your Mac. If you have to mount as network drives, the entire copy would be over network. If you are Unix-y, you could mount the Drobo directly to NAS device as external USB storage and use rsync to copy Drobo files to NAS. Unix rsync has integrity checks. Now that I think about it, you could use rsync with the Drobo and NAS mounted on your Mac as well. Regardless of technique, prepare for a copy process which will take days.

 

[ryanarrr]

There's no good way to move the disks with data on them between two NAS devices, especially not from different vendors. You will have to have your new NAS, or some other storage device like an external hard drive to copy the data to. You could mount both devices on your Mac and run the copy from the Mac; this is probably the most straightforward thing to do. Alternatively, you could probably mount one NAS device on the other and copy the data directly; this would probably be a little faster, but would require much more technical expertise.

16 TB isn't that much data anymore, that can fit on a single hard drive. If it's going to take a while to get the new NAS up, I would go ahead and grab a 16 TB external hard drive to dump the data onto before it's too late.

Regardless of what you are copying the data to, rsync is the way to do the copy. It's a little esoteric at first, but there are plenty of online tutorials on how to use it. If you need to be doubly sure there are also ways to check the integrity of files post copy, look up the command line tools `md5` and `diff`. You'll definitely get more information on this on stackoverflow than here.