Web Reviews

Drobo Makes Data Protection Easy

Indianapolis, IN - July 6, 2009

“I implore you to continue reading, however, with the certain knowledge that what I want to share with you today may very well prevent a very dark day in your life.”

– Jim Cota

This isn’t likely to be the article you thought you’d be reading in this space. It’s certainly not the article I intended to write, but these things occasionally display a life of their own. As a result, this isn’t so much a web review as a life check-in with a technology bent. I implore you to continue reading, however, with the certain knowledge that what I want to share with you today may very well prevent a very dark day in your life.

As computers have become ubiquitous in our lives, they are becoming ever more important archives of people, events, and places. Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder and digital prophet, years ago predicted that the personal computer would become the ‘hub of our digital lives.’ He was right, of course, as digital still cameras have proliferated like weeds and even young kids are shooting, downloading, and editing video on their home computers. So we go on about our days, recording video and taking pictures, loading them in ever-increasing number and volume onto our computers and rarely taking a moment to think about the long term effects of this practice. But pause for just a moment to consider it, and a couple of facts will become immediately clear.

First, there is an ever-increasing need for additional storage space for all of our digital content. On our home computer, for example, we have more than 20,000 photos that have been taken over the last several years. Since the price of storage seems to go down by the week, this is a relatively easy problem to overcome: Simply add additional storage space through something like a new internal or external hard drive, or perhaps network attached storage. While relatively easy, it gets complicated when you try to migrate from one internal hard drive to another, or you need to configure the storage to function correctly. As a result, it can remain above the heads of most ‘normal’ computer users.

The second point is just as certain but one that most people are relatively unaware, which makes it more insidious. Hard drives are mechanical marvels that are in nearly constant use; they spin in the neighborhood of 7,000 rpm (and more), and are the main storage container for all of these things that are so important to us. But they are notoriously fragile. In fact, what I’m about to tell you is the truth, but please don’t shoot the messenger: Hard drives fail. Almost all of them, at one point or another. If you haven’t experienced the gut-wrenching feeling of knowing that you just lost everything, there’s still something you can do. If you’re one of us that have, you know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s not quite catastrophic; it’s not like losing a child or having your house burn down, but it’s extremely painful to lose all of your photos, all of your videos, your documents – everything! The pain is exaggerated because you can’t escape the notion that you could have prevented it from happening in the first place.

That was the look on my brother-in-law’s face when he told me about his experience. He was having trouble with the computer so he took it in to get it fixed. Turned out the hard drive had failed. They replaced it and he headed home. It wasn’t until he got home, told his wife the computer was fixed, and heard her ask, “What about all of the kids photos that were on the old computer?” that the enormity of it sunk in.

So you know you need to have back-ups of your stuff. But back-ups are a little clunky to set up and keep up with, and restoring your data from them can be complex. There are exceptions to this, but most people I know (including me) perceive the issue to be too complicated, so they ignore it. With my brother-in-law’s experience fresh in my mind, I finally decided I couldn’t avoid it any longer. So I bought a Drobo.

How can I best explain what a Drobo is? It’s like a miracle without divinity. It’s a simple solution to a complicated problem. It will keep your spouse happy. Your children will thrive. All will be right with the world. Well, that might be overstating. It’s a data robot in a little black box that could save all of your stuff (and your day, as well).

Essentially, it’s a small cluster of hard drives that you can use as your primary storage device. You hook it up to your computer with an included cable and use it just like the hard drive inside the computer. You can put up to four hard drives in the case (no tools required, by the way, just slide them into the bay) and the Drobo will use the storage space to save your data redundantly across the drives. This means one of the drives can fail (and it ultimately will) without losing anything. You simply slide a new drive in its place, Drobo rebuilds the data, and you continue without error, loss, or issues of any sort.

Unlike the hard drive in your computer, the redundant nature of the data storage is the key. Instead of one point of failure, the Drobo automatically saves all of your data in a way that protects it from failure. This type of storage (called RAID) has been around for awhile, but the true genius of Drobo is its dead-simple set up. You truly just plug it in and go; there’s no complicated configuration, very little set up, and it monitors itself to tell you when to add additional storage or if a drive is experiencing any issues. If it can, it even automatically repairs any damage it finds. If not, it will let you know ahead of time so you can take action. Even if the drive fails, your data is still protected.