Life as Jacob

Image via Wikipedia

I have to tell everyone about this lovely little device.  It’s simple and black with green status lights and blue capacity indicators.  For someone as OCD as I am about keeping pictures and data safe, it answers a lot of questions.  It’s called a Drobo and is the best thing since sliced bread.

I lot of people I know store their files, documents, pictures and such in one place.  Then, on top of that, they never back this data up in any way, shape or form.  It’s super cheap but can cost you a bunch in the long run.  If that hard drive in your computer dies, so does little Jimmy’s 5th birthday party or pictures of granny before she kicked the bucket.  If you don’t have those images printed out or stored elsewhere, their either gone or very expensive to get back.

Multiple friends of mine have come to me asking how to get the data back.  Twice I have sent off hard drives to data recovery experts.  Each time the total cost was over $500.  The Drobo offers a much better solution at roughly the same cost.  For $500 + Shipping, you get a well packaged black box with a USB cable and a CD of drivers.  You now have an automatic system which allows you to put unlimited amounts of storage in a small space.

You can take ( SATA ) hard drives out of your unused machines and stick them in the encasement.  The system then takes those drives and meshes them together to present your computer with one large drive.  As long as you have two or more disks in the system, your data is protected from disk failure.  The beauty here is that when you run out of space on the current configuration, just pop out the smallest drive and insert a new larger one.  The Drobo automagically moves your data around and gives you the extra space.

There are other backup schemes out there such as net storage ( Mozy.com, Amazon S3, Iron Mountain ) but those only work as fast as your internet connection.  Most also come with monthly costs which go up with the amount of data your storing.  For me those services are impractical becasue of the massive number of photos I have to store from my Canon 1d Mark III.

I urge you if you’re reading this to back up your data now.  If you have more than a few gigs worth of Pictures or Music, backup should be one of the first things on your mind.  If you have the money to invest, the Drobo is a great buy.  Otherwise, use the Mozy link on the side to setup a backup routine that will at least get the important stuff.