My Data Robot

One of the less glamorous aspects of photography these days is making redundant copies of data. I've been generating up to 200GB of data for a typical project in recent months, a figure that keeps escalating with increased RAW file sizes, plus the addition of video and audio files.

It's in this context that I love my Drobo units. They make the process of backing up data relatively painless, and they provide a layer of built-in redundancy (meaning you have some protection against individual disk failure).

On the rare occasions when I have to replace one of the disks in a Drobo unit however, it can take quite a while for the data rebuild-and-protection procedure to finish:

backing up with drobo

44 hours seems like a long time, but actually, for the peace of mind of having multiple copies of all my files, it's no big deal.

The copies I'm making now are backups of backups from recent trips...a dull(!) but unavoidable task I have to complete before heading out again.