A Drobo, a Time Machine and two Macs walk into a bar...

November 3, 2011 10:13 AM

I want to sync two comps to my drobo over the network but I need to repartition. HalP!

Here is the situation... I have:

- Drobo
- Mac mini
- Macbook Air

I want to wirelessly backup both my Mac mini AND my Macbook Air to the Drobo. This is not the problem though.

The problem is, if I just turn on Time Machine on both computers AS IS, it will just back up until all the space is gone (which is what time machine was supposed to do). Clearly I need to make a smaller partition, but everything I've read is telling me that I will need to reformat. This is not at all an option.

However, I found out about this utility called Time Tamer, which will seemingly repartition the Drobo for you without reformatting. SCORE!

But! When I download the disk image it shows up as corrupt. Any other attempts to find this piece of software have turned up zilch. Drobo's own page where they used to host the file is also gone.

So...

1. Will my setup work in theory if I get the drobo running? (two comps, two sets of backups, etc)

2. What can I do about this partitioning fiasco? Does anyone have a copy of this software they can zip and email to me (mefimail me).

posted by darkgroove to computers & internet (7 answers total)

Borrow a large drive from a friend, copy contents off drobo, repartiton, copy contents back on to drobo....

It's the solution I came up with to a similar problem..

But it appears that this may also work:

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine MaxSize BLAH

Where BLAH is the size you want to limit in KB.
posted by iamabot at 11:26 AM on November 3, 2011

Like I said, transferring the files is not an option. I have 5TB of files. I'm not playing musical chairs with all that media. Not. Gonna. Happen.

I'll check out what you proposed, although that seems WAY too simple.
posted by darkgroove at 12:47 PM on November 3, 2011

Putting the legwork in to transfer your media seems like a way more sane way than to blindly trust a discontinued repartitioning tool that operated on a proprietary formar block file system. But that's just me.

Worse case, spend 10 bucks on s3 storage, upload the storage over a week and then download it.
posted by iamabot at 1:09 PM on November 3, 2011

Scratch that, I saw a smaller file count, still think copying the media off is a more sound way of going about it.
posted by iamabot at 1:10 PM on November 3, 2011

Repartition the Drobo and restore your data from backup... er, wait - you do have a backup, don't you?

RAID is not a backup.

All your data kept in one place is not a backup.

5TB sounds like a lot of effort to replace.

Maybe acquire another NAS (Drobo or better, e.g. QNAP or Synology) Partition that for your 2 Time Machines, and transfer the data over from the Drobo so it's duplicated. Keep one elsewhere so you can consider it a backup.
posted by dirm at 4:31 PM on November 3, 2011

Worse case, spend 10 bucks on s3 storage, upload the storage over a week and then download it.

One week huh? Let's do the math:

5TB = 5,368,709,120kb

I upload at a BLAZING 40kb/sec.

According to my calculations, that menas it will take me about 4 years to upload that data.

And no, I don't need a backup. If one drive dies, I pop a new one in and poof, I'm good to go. Maybe once I have a higher bandwidth I can think about the idea of uploading some of that data to the cloud. But um... yeah 4 years.
posted by darkgroove at 5:52 AM on November 4, 2011

No backup. What if two drives die? What if drobo falls off shelf into bucket of cooling oil? What if repartitioning goes bad?
posted by Area Control at 11:55 AM on November 4, 2011