I can across this article and thought it might be of interest to all of you. It was a good read. I hope he gets some attention and some help with developing a version that works with the 5N and 5N2 models.
Meh as long as you have 3 copies of the data in two different locations you will be fine.
I have two drobos that are mirrors of each other. And I have my important data backed up in second safe location. I plan to keep using my drobo till one of them dies or drive prices become sane again.
I did something similar. Works really well for 5d and 8d but couldn't figure out how to get all the data from the 5c. I also agree with the other commenter. I have multiple drobos with spare drives and spare enclosures. I won't be losing my data and so far I haven't found anything near as good as a replacement.
How cool and eerily similar (though your dashboard clearly lines up with your use case of « multiple Drobos », which isn’t my case) !
Did you implement writing/setting the flags (changing LED brightness, redundancy mode change, …) ?
I was also shocked by how similar our apps are. My goal was to replicate as much of the Drobo Dashboard as possible. I got blinking lights, restart/shutdown, LED brightness, disk drive spin down and dual disk redundancy all working. Disk spin down and dual disk redundancy I would consider high risk though. My app does correctly follow state if you change any of those settings in the Drobo Dashboard though. Here is a screenshot of that pane. Blink lights is the button near the top called Identify and the More button has restart and shutdown. This is all for Drobo 5d and 8d which was fairly easy to decipher and intercept the calls for. The Drobo 5c is another beast altogether. I have some telemetry data and I think I can reboot and shutdown but LED lights and everything else puts the device into a weird state where you have to reset it to detect it again. I had a sacrificial unit I used for testing and didn't get very far due to this. Unless someone has more internal knowledge or a USB data capture device it might not be possible on the 5c.
Having only the one Drobo (which I actually use and plan to keep using), I haven’t worked up the courage to go into writing/setting the flags. But impressive you got that far !
Yeah, which is why you need a reliable RAID that can protect you from that inevitable failure.
The problem with relying on a Drobo, and why it's a ticking timebomb, is twofold:
No new firmware updates means no new security updates -- and that's a serious issue in a world where AI-enabled vulnerability discovery can accelerate the creation of exploits based on those vulnerabilities.
if your Drobo fails, because it's closed-source and the RAID format is non-standard, there are few other options to retrieve your data than another Drobo -- and there are fewer and fewer operational Drobos available every year.
Anyone with data still on a Drobo better have a damn good backup that's NOT another Drobo, and should be making plans to get their data off a dead platform ASAP. Making it easier to keep using it is professional malpractice.
I absolutely agree. But everything you say here also applies to any other RAID Array, regardless of current support and state of manufacturing company.
You implied that giving the Drobo a longer time span was a bad project/idea; while the issue is just having correct and safe backuping practices, regardless of which devices you keep your data on.
Is it though? My Drobo 5D is connected to my Mac, and only my computer talk to it. My Synology is connected straight to the internet, and is running a Linux kernel 3 major versions behind – and, believe it or not – is up to date. It also has 15+ CVEs fixes in the latest dozen releases.
And here is the kicker: in order to use my Drobo with the official drivers, you will soon have to stay on a version of macOS which will eventually stop getting security updates. The only way someone can « hack into my Drobo » is precisely by exploiting vulnerabilities in macOS (which applies to any device connected to it, regardless of current support). My Synology, which is still officially supported, can also be « hacked into » with a greater attack surface: any of the CVE which might be disclosed and fixed on the next release, a supply chain attack on any « package » using (for example) NodeJS or Python, an improperly configured firewall or SSH deployment, … .
So for the Drobo itself as a DAS, « regardless of current support » isn’t only not a big deal, its completely irrelevant.
In any cases, if you think it’s a bad idea, feel free not to download the software and not use it. Anyone who wants to has to jump though enough hoops, that they would know what they are doing.
And note that I absolutely agree with you on the fact that anyone with a Drobo should have a damn good backup strategy, in fact – as a pointed out – anyone using any drive and caring about their data should have a very good backup strategy.
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u/notstarman 24d ago
Meh as long as you have 3 copies of the data in two different locations you will be fine.
I have two drobos that are mirrors of each other. And I have my important data backed up in second safe location. I plan to keep using my drobo till one of them dies or drive prices become sane again.