Hello, my good old friend Drobo 5D died after 14 years of 24/7/365 service. I have no clue what to do. I have heard Synology is the best, but also see they only have NAS. I am looking for a good substitution for Drobo. My discs are not NAS, but regular. What can I do? Also looking for a solution on where I can insert my 5 discs (not all the same size) without losing any info.
Please help me, I am desperate. Can’t live without my Plex. Almost 2 decades recollecting movies, tv series, and music.
This is going to be a hard step but should be doable.
The single most important question is - How are the drives structured?
Are they RAID 5 ? RAID 6 ? Single-filesystem drives ?
I have personally moved from a mac mini with a drobo to Unraid. https://unraid.net/
It will NOT be plug and play. You will need a whole new PC, new drives and all.
You may want to contact DriveSavers. They may be able to recover your data from your drobo. https://drivesaversdatarecovery.com/
To add to Urbanracer34.
My reason for asking the structure is simple:
Presuming the drives themselves have not failed —
To add to ChuckPa.
Drobos have a completely proprietary file system. A set of disks in a drobo can only be accessed by another drobo. I have heard whispers of a program that can read them on Linux but I don’t know anything about it.
Doing a bit of research – (thanks @urbanracer34 )
EXT3 is native
UFS filesystem (BSD Unix) can be added to Ubuntu
The challenge is to identify the partition(s) needed, and mount them.
( Linux program gparted makes this an easier task)
From there, the EXT3 / UFS driver will bring the filesystem up to usable status
SUPPLEMENTAL:
Given the unit died…
The drobo company has essentially thrown in the towel. Any drobo is essentially on borrowed time.
Concur.
Hello mate.
eBay I tried, all used and 1.5months delay on shipping since I am in Spain.
Same as 1.
Transfer the drives you mean e.g. buying a Synology DS1522+ and inserting my drives in it? That was my ask for help, would that work? My Drobo was not a NAS but a DAS, would my disks work on such NAS?
Copy how? My Drobo has a mirror system that organices the files in such a way that that is not easy… plus being over 50tb.
Thanks a lot!!
Javier
that is what i was afraid of… Synergy told me that should work but did not believe it.
thanks mate! unfortunatelly i am in Spain, so I could not send that to them to the US to recover.
I will investigate Unraid.
Thanks a loT!
well to be honest, i have no clue. I just bought hard drives and kept on adding more to the drobo… no idea if they are Raid 5 or 6 to be honest. My files were stored there in single file system… using the finder of the Mac Mini.
If it was a single filesystem then it’s “BeyondRAID” type RAID. (Hybrid)
Getting your data off will not be easy – UNLESS – you can get your hands on a box and populate it with your drives.
The alternative is to get a service to do it.
Personally, I prefer doing things myself but I know my skill level.
Recently, I also migrated from a Drobo 5D3 to a Synology NAS, fearing that the box might die, eventually, or they will stop their support for macOS.
I would also try to get my hands on another box (5D, 5D3 or even 8D: Migration - Drobo) to regain access to your data and move it to another device.
ChuckPa, if I loose all the info when passing to a new server, do you know where in the Mac can I find a list of all the tvshows and movies that I had on my previous server? So I can evaluate the possiblity of having to restore all my files manually to a new Synology…
Thanks mate
It is possible to extract the raw pathnames from old databases.
It’s messy but will allow a complete list of movies / episodes / songs.
Have a look at WebTools-NG and its ExportTools functionality.
I read about it but says it needs my Drobo connected to the Mac Mini in order to operate. My Mac mini is perfect and it has all the plex info inside, but the drobo is dead. Is actually knowing where is there a file in the Mac Mini that holds the info of my database (movies and series that i have)… thanks mate.
Is actually knowing where is there a file in the Mac Mini that holds the info of my database (movies and series that i have)… is there not such file in the plex media server files of the mac mini? thanks a lot for your patience.
No matter where PMS is installed,
Under the ‘Plex Media Server’ directory, you will find ‘Plug-in Support’
Under ‘Plug-in Support’, you will find ‘Databases’
All the database files, specifically com.plexapp.plugins.library.db are what you need.
com.plexapp.plugins.library.db contains the pathnames of your media files.
From those pathnames, you can reconstruct what media you had.
On a Mac, ~/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server is where you begin.
(Plex was initially developed on MacOS)
