Drobo FS died, looking for another and drives

[Thorin]

I'm cloning the drives again, and once done I'm going to try putting the clones in the old FS to see if it recognizes it as the disk pack that came out of there. It should, it's all cloned.

If that doesn't work (it'll take three days), then I'll has ever to get a hold of Drobo support and probably pay to have them help me. 

I should've bought a Synology when Mr. A bought his, I wouldn't have all these headaches now.

[Tom]

I think it might have made sense to do the cloning on a pc with raw disks or partclone etc.

[Thorin]

Drobo's sparse documentation says to do a block-level clone. ddrescue does a block-level clone, right? What you're suggesting isn't a block-level clone, if I understand correctly.

[Melbosa]

Order can matter in RAIDs btw (I had this problem with DLINK's NAS), make sure the disks go in the same order they came out (which I hope you can remember).

[Thorin]

I have stickered every drive, and wrote SRC or TGT on the sticker, and put a number 1-5 on each sticker.  It's not supposed to matter with Drobo, but just in case, I made sure I knew exactly what drive came from what slot and what slot to put it back in.

[Tom]

Drobo's sparse documentation says to do a block-level clone. ddrescue does a block-level clone, right? What you're suggesting isn't a block-level clone, if I understand correctly.

Oh right, sorry. You did use dd? Yes, that'd work. Now I presume you didn't let anything modify the clones you made? so you can always try again?

[Darren Dirt]

Considering you can get 512GB miro sd cards now and micron has released a 1TB micro sd card, yeah. things sure change.

Confirmed! 256GB microSD just put in my Samsung A8 and it only cost $49.99! https://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX73347

[Thorin]

Drobo's sparse documentation says to do a block-level clone. ddrescue does a block-level clone, right? What you're suggesting isn't a block-level clone, if I understand correctly.

Oh right, sorry. You did use dd? Yes, that'd work. Now I presume you didn't let anything modify the clones you made? so you can always try again?

I think the new 5N2 started formatting them or something, so when I put them in the old FS it saw them as modified. I didn't let anything happen to the original drives, though, which is why I'm cloning a second time. I have successfully resisted the urge to put my originals in anything.

[Tom]

Drobo's sparse documentation says to do a block-level clone. ddrescue does a block-level clone, right? What you're suggesting isn't a block-level clone, if I understand correctly.

Oh right, sorry. You did use dd? Yes, that'd work. Now I presume you didn't let anything modify the clones you made? so you can always try again?

I think the new 5N2 started formatting them or something, so when I put them in the old FS it saw them as modified. I didn't let anything happen to the original drives, though, which is why I'm cloning a second time. I have successfully resisted the urge to put my originals in anything.

Ah, good. I was worried there. I'm glad you don't have a problem with the drives themselves. you generally don't get a second chance to copy off dying/dead disks.

[Thorin]

Honestly, I think this is going to turn out to be a failed power brick that I could've bought for a hundred bucks or less.

[Thorin]

Finished cloning the drives a second time last night, so I put the clones in the old FS and connected the new 5N2's power supply since they're interchangeable according to Drobo.  The FS started up, took ten minutes, then told me that too many disks had been removed from the disk pack and to put the drives I removed back in.  So no, you can't clone a diskpack onto other-sized disks and then use the cloned diskpack as if it was the original.  That sucks.

So I finally bit the bullet.  Shut down the FS, took out the cloned diskpack, put in the original diskpack, and started the FS back up.  So that's the old drives in the old Drobo with the new power supply.  It starts up, after ten minutes all the lights are green but the Drobo can't be accessed via File Explorer and Drobo Dashboard says the file system can't be mounted.  FSCK!  Okay, a bunch of googling, Drobo says to repair the file system but that could cause all data to get lost, at this point I feel a crushing weight of despair that my family's pictures from the last fifteen years are gone forever.

Instead of doing the repair, I decide to do a proper shutdown (since the last time these drives were used the Drobo did not properly shut down because of a power failure), and then start back up.  Takes nearly twenty minutes, but finally the file system mounts and all files are available!  So yes, it really was just the old powerbrick stopped working.

I now have all the important files, documents, and pictures getting copied over to another drive in my main computer.  I'll be setting up BackBlaze for my main computer, so that those docs and pics start living in the cloud.  Then I'll start migrating 7TB from the old FS to my main computer, and then from my main computer to the new 5N2.  Since I only have one working powerbrick for the Drobos, I have to do it with this intermediate step.

I plan to order another powerbrick for the FS, and then set this all up so that I have my main computer, 5N2, and FS all working together.
main computer
- Plex
- all MyDocs folders point to 5N2
- scheduled backup of MyDocs from 5N2 to local drive
- BackBlaze backs up MyDocs backup on local drive
- scheduled backup of other files from 5N2 to FS
secondary computers
- all MyDocs folders point to 5N2
5N2
- holds active copy of docs/pics and other files
FS
- holds secondary copy of same files as 5N2

So all the most important files will be on three devices at home and backed up to the cloud.  And then the nearly 7TB of "replaceable but would rather not spend that much time replacing them" files will be on two devices at home.

Does anyone have any suggestions for good Windows software to just backup files from one network location to another?  If not, I'm kinda thinking of writing my own little utility, it's really not that hard to do, I just know my file copying code will probably not be nearly as efficient as professional software.

[Melbosa]

PowerShell with RoboCopy is my suggestion if you are doing it yourself.  I've used XXcopy in the past as well as it has some nice robust features over robocopy.

[Thorin]

Xxcopy is no more, because the person primarily responsible for Pixelabs, the maker of xxcopy, died in the summer of 2017 and the business shut down.

RoboCopy, you'd set that up as a scheduled task to call some powershell, then the powershell calls RoboCopy, right?  I could probably just make myself an installable Windows service that does the same thing.  I dunno which is less work / easier to maintain and remember to transfer to a new computer when I (some day) upgrade.

[Lazybones]

PowerShell with RoboCopy is my suggestion if you are doing it yourself.  I've used XXcopy in the past as well as it has some nice robust features over robocopy.

I would agree, if you want to SYNC two folders via a simple schedule on windows Robocopy is the best it does deltas, permission etc and even multi-threading. Similar to RSYNC on Linux.

For my phone photos and videos I have my phone and my wifes phone use the Google Phots FREE sync by default, which does reduce original quality but is unlimited. Then when the phones are full ish we DUMP the originals to our NAS so I always have two copies. I am also considering setting up a full backup of the critical NAS data to something like black blase as well.

[Thorin]

Man, you'd think it'd be easy to get a power supply for a Drobo, but no.  Drobo sells them on their website, and they sell in the US and in the EU including the UK, but apparently not in Canada.  Canadian Amazon has several cheap Chinese knockoffs, I'm not interested in that.  I found a site DroboWorks.com, they're an official reseller, I'm waiting to hear how much it costs for a proper branded power supply to get shipped to Canada.  I found a couple of proper power supplies on US Amazon, but I'm sure the shipping to Canada is $50+, making the power supplies, like, $150+.

I'm at the point where I think I should get all my files over to the 5N2, bite the bullet and buy a Synology, sell the 5N2, and just junk the FS.  I'm getting so sick of the roadblocks I'm encountering.