Using The Data Robotics Drobo In A Mixed Windows & Mac Office For Data File Storage and Sharing

Like most small businesses we have gone through our share of data loss over the years so we had put into place a cheap solution. We bought some single disk networked storage disks, we bought four all up. Some disks were used by one person, some were shared. Very quickly, within two years of buying them, three of the four disks had given up. We were left with one single backup disk which we replicated onto a dedicated Windows XP PC which in turn had a dedicated USB backup drive.

It was our crude attempt at dual disk redundancy. Then we discovered the data robotics Drobo. We had heard about the Drobo for some time through the MacBreak Weekly podcast out of the US where they often referred to the Drobo and how great it is.

A Drobo is a range of data storage robots. A big black box to you and me that you slide 3.5 inch disks into. Using the supplied Drobo Dashboard software you can format the disks for FAT32 for Windows only use or HFS+ if you plan to use the Drobo with a Mac and even shared with Windows if you run it through disk sharing on an Airport Extreme or Time Capsule.

We implemented a Drobo S to replace the network single disk, dedicated Windows XP backup and its USB backup disk. We share the Drobo in the office with Windows and Mac users.

Click here to read the full blog on how we did it.