Drobo and TimeMachine over a network

I have no experience with a Drobo but would suggest also considering a ReadyNAS network RAID. (NetGear recently bought this company).

There's no wireless option but you can connect it to the network via a sharing router such as an Airport Extreme (the ReadyNAS has Gigabit Ethernet).

Just a random check with Google Products shows the price of the ReadyNAS is comparable with a Drobo + DroboShare (no disks for either config).

I have a ReadyNAS NV and have been using it for around 2 years now with no problems. My backup routine is a manual one (I just drag my iPhoto library onto the RAID across the network, for example).

(I can't use Time Machine because it has no encryption; I often work on NDA-type of business documents and can't have any leaks that I can't keep track of. I also have not yet found an automated back up software that I feel comfortable with to depend on. That kinda sucks but experience just tells me to keep it simple).

Anyway, I guess maybe I wrote more than two cents and will stop rambling now.

Cheers! Angus

PS - The ReadyNAS provides RAID-5.

At 12:58 AM -0700 3/18/08, Alexander Hoffman wrote:
>1) If TM can use a drive/storage solution through USB, does that mean
>that it can use it over a network? Are there any additional
>requirements of storage in order for them to be network compatible?
>(I would think that they are equivalent, I couldn't get anyone at
>Apple who could say they knew for sure.)

I believe that if you hook Drobo via USB to a Mac running Leopard
(MUST be Leopard), you should be able to back up to it over the
network. I do this with a second internal drive on a G4 running
Leopard, which shouldn't be any different.

>2) Is there any difference between how TM works with a drive
>connected to a TimeCapsule and one connected to (and shared from) a
>Mac running Leopard? (Again, no definitive answer from Apple. Maybe
>I'm worrying to much here, but I'd like to be sure.)

As far as I know, it's basically the same.

>3) How's the speed on AirPort Disks attached to an AirPort Extreme,
>compared to attached to a TimeCapsule and compared to a disk attached
>to and shared from a Mac? (I'd guess that the Mac would be the
>fastest, and perhaps TC faster than the BS.)

I don't know of any tests of this performance, but I agree that a Mac
is likely the fastest. AirPort Extremes and Time Capsules won't have
the same CPU performance.

>4) Between 802.11n, USB 2.0 (hard disk), and fast Ethernet (100bT),
>where's the bottleneck? Is TM itself the bottleneck? Does gigabit
>Ethernet make a difference in this setup? (My guess is that the USB
>connection is the bottleneck.)

My money is on USB and the drive performance in general being the bottleneck.

>5) DroboShare does HFS+, but over SMB. SMB is not supported by TM.
>There's the well known hack and the less well known problem with it.
>Given the expendability of Drobo, should I worry about this? (I'm
>leaning against DroboShare, but I'd like to figure it if is a
>reasonable option.)
><http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071028173642747>
>http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5918065

I wouldn't hack anything related to Time Machine, personally. Data
integrity is too important.

The real issue with the Drobo and Time Machine is that the Drobo
fakes out the Mac into thinking it's a 2 TB disk, even when it's not.
It has a funky method of slowing down and flashing lights when the
real available disk space gets low.

But Time Machine has its own way of dealing with low disk space - by
removing old backups. So, as I understand both products, you would
need to partition the Drobo with real fixed partition sizes to enable
Time Machine to manage disk space on its own properly.

cheers... -Adam

I use my Drobo with Time Machine, but have enforced a size limit on the backups.

I issued the following command in the terminal:

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine MaxSize 102400

The size is measured in megabytes- my example is 100GB.

A year later- this command does not seem to work (even with the integer option). Looks like the official answer is to use a sparse disk image.