Appleinsider reported in July that Drobo has filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy
I can’t believe I missed this news, but here it is reported by William Gallagher at AppleInsider.
Now I have never owned a drobo, but I always aspired to for backup, but even if the company is still around this sure makes me worry.
The thing is that there just aren’t that many NAS’s that are great with Mac.
At one point I had a Synology where I tried moving my iTunes lIbrary, but that did not work out. It jacked up my whole library and lost a bunch of media, so I lost thousands of songs, and years of track metadata as well. And there is the whole issue of companies like Synology making you move to new hardware for software updates, since they use proprietary system software.
There was a recent article at Maximum PC on rolling your own NAS using Ubuntu Server LTS build which does major releases every 2 years instead of 6, and because each release is supported with 5 years of full support, and 5 years of extended security support, but that runs NTFS, and not mac HFS+ which scares me, and it since it is not in the Linux kernal, it can’t be written to (though it can be read).
It is too bad Mac doesn’t make a simple NAS software so you can roll your own drobo type device for Time Machine.
Backblaze cloud backup version 8 on Mac increases threading and reduced disk load according to 9to5 Mac
Bradley Chambers at 9 to 5 Mac has an article on the latest update to the Backblaze app for Mac. They have increased the threads from 30 to 100 and reduced disk load by 80% which can be nothing but good.
I moved to BackBlaze when my previous backup went corporate only. Now it took me a year to get my backup (and I haven’t backed up most of my video files which are just too big) but I use this and time machine to know that my important files will be safe.
Once you lose a hard drive you will always run a couple of backup solutions and having them run better is always a good thing.
Jason Snell at Six Colors is right, you’re not backing up enough
And it is true, you need to be backing up in every way possible and with local and cloud based copies, just in case something happens.
I use both Time Machine and Backblaze and even with that I can’t backup everything. I don’t have a drobo to be able to backup everything locally (my video is on a RAID 5, so if a drive fails I should be able to recover that, but even my Backblaze took the better part of a year to backup everything I had set to backup.
Losing a drive one or a whole computer will be the lesson to get you to start backing up, but you need to backup as much as you can and as often as you can, preferable constantly!
Crashplan closing it’s consumer backup plans is b******t
Crashplan recently announced that it was getting rid of it’s consumer plan and moving to business only plans and when your current plan runa out you would need to switch to one if their other more expenaive plans. And yes you get a sicount on year but can only move over 5 TB of your saves, but i have 7 Tb of saves so i am screwed!
And i just renewed not 2 months ago, but what is the poont of continuing backup to a service that is going to delete a third of my backup? And then I pay more? They should really regund the rest of my plan so i can use it to move to another less expensive service like Back Blaze!