Drobo or something else?

[Lukky]

I am looking at purchasing a drobo or another storage unit to backup the machines at my church. Just curious if anyone was using the drobo and what they thought about it. I am looking at the base usb model not the FS. I am also looking at some of the sans digital enclosures. They seem to do almost the same thing. Just not sure if they will configure different size drives like the drobo.

Thanks Dustin

[bladeaudio]

I use a drobo to back up all of my media (sermon audio/video) and it works great! Very nice peace of mind. It is the USB model with 5 drives in it. Can't complain about anything, it just works.

[bpalermini]

I use a network attached Drobo at work and it is great. Gives you peace of mind that you're not going to loose everything.

[Lukky]

Hear is something I am reading that worries me. If the actual Drobo goes bad it is almost impossible to get your data back. Because you cant just stick your drives in another one and expect it to read the raid array the same way. I was looking at using this as a file server as well and I am not sure I will have all the files stored anywhere else. I have also read that there file system is proprietary therefore if you pull the drives you get nothing.

[blonborg]

A single copy of your data (even if it's on a RAID array) isn't a substitute for a backup strategy.

Originally Posted by Lukky

I was looking at using this as a file server as well and I am not sure I will have all the files stored anywhere else.

At a minimum, you might want to have some extra portable drives (eSATA, Firewire, USB) that you synchronize with your Drobo, etc. Consider keeping a backup offsite.

At my church, I've been doing D2D2D, keeping a hard disk backup at church and a copy of it offsite. The offsite copy is a full backup and usually no more than a week behind.

Bill

[EricE]

Originally Posted by Lukky

I am looking at purchasing a drobo or another storage unit to backup the machines at my church.

Windows Home Server 2011.

Has excellent Windows client backup built in, including bare Metal restore of a computer. If the hard drive in one of your computers dies, go to the WHS 2011 console, stick in a 2GB flash drive, click on the backup tab, click on the computer you need to restore, click on the option to create a flash boot disk and while that's creating change out the dead hard drive for same size or bigger.

Once the flash drive is created, plug into the dead machine, boot from flash drive and follow the prompts. In under an hour (depending on the size of the original drive of course) the machine will be restored.

The WHS backup also performs de-dupe. I have 10 windows machines backing up in less than 400GB of space. These machines are a mixture of Vista/Windows 7 and a few versions of Office. It's very efficient!

Users can restore from backups - history is configurable. I keep two weeks of dailies, six weeks of weekly backups and a year of monthlies.

And the WHS is running along side our Small Business Server 2011 standard. They compliment each other. I wish they would just build the client backup into SBS 2011!

And if you don't have SBS 2011 (sounds like you don't), you may wish to look at Small Business Server Essentials. You get support for 25 computers (up from 10 of WHS), the same client backup and ActiveDirectory - which makes account and computer management a whole lot easier.

If you don't have a charity license with Microsoft, set one up! We use and are very happy with Software One - I posted our account reps info in another thread here today - look at my post history to find it. You can probably get SBS Essentials for around $100 - it's a steal.

I scored this HP Microserver from MacMall for $200 a few weeks back: http://www.macmall.com/p/HP-Servers/...50~pdp.gdahgba

Even at the current price it's a great deal. Throw in a couple of 2TB drives, mirror 'em, add either WHS ($45 on sale all the time all over the place - newegg right now I think) or SBS Essentials and you will have an awesome solution.

I really liked the promise of Drobo - I have a Gen2 myself. But their recent inability to support Mac OSX Lion (where I use my Drobo), their cost, the availability of cheap large hard drives that are easy to mirror have softened me on them. If you need a good value on an iSCSI SAN, I think they are impossible to beat with their 8 drive solutions - but I'm not as enthused about their lower end NAS solutions. I'd love to take an elite or business and use it as an iSCSI SAN for our virtualized servers. I'd just be a little concerned about the performance given my experience with the Gen2 - then again it's over 4 years old now

But if you are a windows shop, WHS 2011 or SBS Essentials on an HP Microserver is hard to beat! And both run just fine in 2 GB of RAM (surprised me!), but obviously more is better. And if you are running Mac OSX 10.6 (not Liion) or earlier, WHS and SBS Essentials come with Mac Time Machine support. No word on if MS is going to update WHS or SBS Essentials to support Lion, so it's useful for Mac's too (surprisingly!)

Heck, I'm running a CrashPlan Pro Enterprise server on my WHS 2011 box - an Atom based HP DataVault with the stock 2GB of RAM. Although I do admit I'm pushing it and will probably spring for a RAM upgrade to max it out at 4GB, it chugs along with no issues. The HP Microservers are a worthy successor to the DataVaults and MediaVaults - double bonus, they come with 2 PCIe slots and aren't headless only appliances.