Sleep Time and Backup

So the Drobo at the office has been hooked up to the server via USB and has been working reasonably well for a couple weeks. During our normal operations, I discover that the Drobo tends to sleep relatively fast (around 10-15 minutes, I think).  The data would still be accessible, but the lag time was getting to be a little bit annoying especially after a short break such as lunch time. At that time, there was no function to disable the automatic sleep.

Some of the more sensitive corporate information was still stored on the server and was periodically backed up to the Drobo at night.  The backup was an encrypted zip file created by the built-in windows backup software. It was discovered after many discussions and headaches that the built-in windows backup software would abort a backup if the destination was not accessible. The sleeping Drobo was considered inaccessible when it came time to do the backups and, hence, the backups always failed to start. The only thing that seemed to work was a batch file that would run just prior to the backup that was designed to wake up the Drobo. This only worked some of the time and we never did figure out a good way to keep the Drobo awake.

I researched a solution and it turns out that the Drobo Share (no longer available) could be loaded with some custom scripts and programs called Drobo Apps.  These programs range from media servers to hosting software.  There was a script that would keep the Drobo from sleeping so I though I would give it a try. It would also offer the advantage of having network attached storage rather than relying on the server.  So I dropped another $250.00.  Long story short... the Drobo continued to sleep, the Drobo Share would constantly drop the connection, the Backups continued to fail, and the Drobo Dashboard would not communicate to it. Because there was no power switch, I would have to pull the power cable and risk the data every time it would freeze or drop a connection (which was NEVER ENDING). It was at this time we discovered that it also started corrupting files during normal operation. Read the next post for details.