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.

I haven't talked about the Drobo yet, but it's quite possibly the perfect local backup machine. It acts like an external drive, but uses logic to store all your files redundantly across multiple drives inside the Drobo. So if you have two 1TB drives, it will show as 1TB of storage and mirror across the two drive. If one dies, your files are still safe and you can just plug in another drive to get the Drobo back up and running again.

Here's a great video about the Drobo, if you're not convinced.

The exciting part is that there's a great way to save a lot of money on a first generation Drobo. B&H currently has a first generation Drobo for only $349 with free shipping. I have the first gen Drobo and the only difference between that and the new Drobo is the new one has FireWire 800, not very useful if you mainly use PCs and not Macs.

A Drobo isn't much good without at least two drives. But Amazon is selling Seagate 1TB Hard Drives for only $109 with free shipping! UPDATE:They also have Western Digital Caviar 1TB Hard Drives on sale at the same price. This means you could have a full Drobo RAID-like external hard drive system for only $569.00!

That still may sound like a lot for an external hard drive, but being able to have one device that you can put files on and it will automatically back itself up on multiple drives is the holy grail of local backup. Plus, if you ever need more storage, you can just buy another cheap hard drive, plug it into the Drobo, and instantly have more space to store your stuff. With four hard drive bays on the device, there's plenty of room to grow.

I will be talking more about how the Drobo works in a future post. You can do fine with just regular external hard drives, but I've found that once you out grow a drive like that, you have to get another and they just start stacking up everywhere. Plus, if the drive dies, you've lost the whole thing and have to start over with a new one. If that's the only place you keep that data, the data is just gone. With the Drobo, I can just buy another drive, plug it in and go. I would recommend getting one if you can, and would really recommend getting one now with these prices the way they are.

I want to remind everyone that we all have things that we must make sure we keep. There are so many things on your computer that deserve your attention more than you might think.

When I was growing up, I can remember looking through family photo albums that my parents had. It included pictures of them when they were babies all the way up to when they got married. There were also family members I had never met, great aunts and uncles, grandparents and great grandparents. To me and my family, those pictures are priceless.

I don't know what kind of photo album my children will look at, but I'll bet you it's digital. More and more of our family photographs and letters are on our computers, sometimes only on our computer, and we have an obligation to future generations to keep it safe.

I've always heard horror stories about a family's whole history going up in a house fire or flood. Those stories always scare me and I know they bother my wife, who does our family genealogies.

Luckily, we've digitized most of our older family photos and any new photos are from digital cameras. While hard drives and CD storage is more fragile than actual photographs, digital data is able to be duplicated with no loss of quality and is very inexpensive to store. That means we can have multiple copies of it stored in multiple places and if a hard drive fails or a CD breaks, we won't have lost all those memories.

That is the whole reason this blog was started, to help you protect and keep what is most valuable to you. Whether that's your company's financial documents or your child's baby pictures, some of what you have on your computer is priceless. I want you to dedicate yourself, right now, to reading the suggestions in this blog and taking the time to protect your data. I don't want you to be too late on this. Once you're too late, there's no going back and fixing it.

I've talked about the backup plan, and I'll soon get into specifics on what programs and services to use. Keep this post in mind when reading them and, if you aren't using these services, please implement them soon. You won't regret it.

I talked about setting up a backup plan, but there's another thing to think about; what should you backup? It should be clear that the more you backup, the more you'll pay for your backups. By being selective in what you backup, you'll be able to keep the costs down. I've gone through this myself and came up with a couple simple rules to follow.

Everyone needs a plan. A backup plan, that is. Everyone's backup strategy will be different and personalized to their circumstances and abilities, but all backup plans should have certain things in common. Using these guidelines, you should be able to tailor a plan to fit your needs.