I was talking to a friend / colleague of mine (Ty Milford) yesterday and we got onto the topic of Backup / Archiving our systems. Right now we are both on the method of simply copying to external disk arrays. It works fine but is a bit cumbersome. We have multiple computer systems here and the system we use for imaging is a stand alone and separate from the computer I use on a daily basis. My daily computer I am backing up using Apple’s Time Machine, and specifying an external drive as the destination. So far it has been working fine and thankfully I have not needed to access it! But knowing it is constantly updating on it’s own really gives me peace of mind.

But I really have been thinking about how to migrate to a better system for the imaging computer. With close to 3TB of information, we have a lot to stay on top of! Okay, getting to the point, yesterday Ty told me about this new backup drive system called Drobo. So I went to their web site and checked it out. It really appears to be a great system and in addition works with Time Machine!

Drobo and Time Machine together creates an automatic and secure backup of all of your data. The cool thing is that it is scalable. That is it can grow as your data does. Start out small and just add more or larger hard drives to the self contained system as you need or can afford them. Plus you are only buying bare drives and not having to pay for the fancy casings etc.

Their website has a demonstration video that shows the system, and it works on either Mac or Windows!

Although we have not purchased it quite yet I think it will be the next investment (add it to the list!)