One of the best local backup devices today is the Drobo. The Drobo is a fast, expandable external hard drive. What makes it unique isn't that it's an external hard drive enclosure, but how it stores the data on the drives.

Redundant Redundancy

A Drobo has four hard drive bays that fit any size SATA drive you can buy. You'll need at least two drives for the Drobo to do it's magic.

No matter how many drives you have in the Drobo, the Drobo will show up on your Desktop as one external drive. Every file you put on the Drobo will actually get written to at least two of the drives. This protects your data from hard drive failure. If one of the drives dies, all hard drives will die eventually, your data is still safe on the other drives. Once you replace the faulty drive with a new one, the data will be recreated and will once again be protected.

You can actually mix and match drives in the Drobo, adding different size drives to different bays. The nice thing about that is, as drives get cheaper or if you see one on sale, you can just buy it and plug it into the Drobo without worrying about whether it will work with the other drives. You can see how different drives react to each other with the Drobolator.

If you ever run out of room, all you'll need to do it just buy another drive and plug it into the Drobo. The Drobo will automatically recognize that a new drive has been added and add it automatically into the system.

If a drive dies, the Drobo will alert you to the fact with flashing red lights. Just pop out the bad drive, pop in a new one and you're ready to go.

RAID!

This will sound familiar to any techie since the Drobo is basically just a RAID device. RAID has been around for years and is used by web servers and enterprise data centers to redundantly keep data on more than one drive. The big difference between the Drobo and a regular RAID system is maintenance. RAID systems can be a nightmare to set up and keep running. Also, most RAID systems require that you have all the same size drive installed, making it a pain if you ever want to upgrade to larger drives. I like to call the Drobo a consumer RAID device, since it handles all of the complicated RAID stuff behind the scenes and displays a simple interface for the user. If you know how to use a regular external drive, you know how to use a Drobo.

Problems

There have been many bad reviews on Amazon over the Drobo. The main complaint seems to be support but there is also talk of all four of the hard drives dying at the same time. This could be due to using all the same type of hard drive (namely, low quality drives) or running the Drobo for very long periods of time, which effectively cooked the hard drives. Either way, it is something to be aware of. I use my Drobo mainly for backups and rarely work straight off of it and I can say that I have had no problem with it at all.

I was also recently asked what I would do if the Drobo itself failed but the hard drives were fine. The only thing you can do in this situation is get a new Drobo since it what it writes to the disks is actually gibberish that only it understands. Some people are uncomfortable with that and if you're one of those people, you shouldn't get a Drobo. I'm okay with this since I see $350 a small price to pay to get my data back. It's much more troubling to me to have a hard drive crash and have everything gone than to have my Drobo crash and I just need to buy a new one to get everything back.

Also, the Drobo is pricey. I bought mine for $750, but you can get a full Drobo system for only $569. That still might be too much for some, but it really is the safest way to keep a local backup and, since it's expandable with more and larger drives, should last for many years to come.