A special “Thank You” goes out to Data Robotics for sponsoring the Daddy On Board Podcast (put on by Clayton Morris and Mike Quackenbush), which I watch and listen to regularly.  It’s a fun podcast put on by a couple of new fathers that discuss a wide range of baby and toddler-related topics.  Good stuff and worth a listen, check it out.

Anyway, several weeks ago I tossed my name into a drawing they were putting on for a new Drobo, and won!

For those unfamiliar, a Drobo is a small box that holds several hard drives and makes them function as one, larger drive.   More importantly, there is data protection built-in so that your data is safe even if a drive (or two, depending on configuration) dies.

It arrived today, the brand-new edition of the Drobo S.  This new one has USB 3.0, Firewire, and eSATA and can hold up to 5 drives.   I don’t have any USB 3 ports here yet, so it’s currently connected to my desktop via the slower USB 2.  A USB 3 card should be arriving early next week 🙂

Here’s the Drobo with 3 new 1TB drives (yes, I label my drives so I know how old they are):

Setup was a piece of cake, and it fits perfectly in a small table next to my desk.  Here it is ready to start storing lots of data:

I have it configured to be able to survive 2 drives failing, so that 3TB of raw storage really only gets me 1 TB of usable space.  But that’s fine, I’m paranoid about hard drives eating my data.

Now that it’s here, I am moving 223 GB of home videos to it that were too large to fit in with my standard backup procedures.   Then I need to figure out where exactly this will fit in with all of my other data storage –  I’m pretty sure it will just hold backups, but which backups (I already have 2 RAID arrays here with further copying to external drives for off-site rotation) is the question.