Comments on: Formatting the Drobo for Time Machine Backups

By: cork

cork — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 17:09:17 +0000

@Troy: Did you find a way to do this, i'm sitting on the same issue right now....

By: nashmoto

nashmoto — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 16:25:17 +0000

Create a share using the Drobo Dashboard and select the Time Machine option. Again, in the the Drobo Dashboard, choose Settings > Shares and choose the mount check box for your new Time Machine Share (this may take a while to mount). Now go to your Time Machine System Preferences and the volume should be available now for backup.

By: Troy

Troy — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 21:53:17 +0000

I've created the sparseimage, but I can't get the mounted image to show up as an option for Time Machine.
I'm using an original drobo, directly attached to the mac. Any thoughts?

By: Drobo Post Still Getting Hits | NSLog();

Drobo Post Still Getting Hits | NSLog(); — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 01:32:06 +0000

[...] interesting to me that this Drobo post from late 2008 is still getting hits. But, then again, the information is pretty good and still relevant, so in [...]

By: Drobo S « John’s Blog

Drobo S « John’s Blog — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 04:06:10 +0000

[...] for me. And there’s a good discussion of some of this stuff on a couple of blogs — this one was most helpful to [...]

By: Offsite Backup for Photographers « Josh Anon

Offsite Backup for Photographers « Josh Anon — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 04:17:21 +0000

[...] Machine. Using a Drobo with Time Machine can be a bit painful, but my friend Erik has posted an excellent blog post about how to make it work. I’m quite happy with this setup, as I can have multiple drives [...]

By: James Conroy-Finn

James Conroy-Finn — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 10:49:28 +0000

My favourite way to get the MAC address for the en0 interface and format it for use in a TM sparsebundle image name is below.

ifconfig en0 | awk ' /ether/ { gsub(/:/, ""); print $2 } '

If you're a CLI ninja you could also get the machine name using `scutil --get LocalHostName` and concatenate that with the formatted MAC address to do everything in one go!

Thought you might find it useful. Thanks for the write up!

By: Curt

Curt — Thu, 20 May 2010 03:13:47 +0000

I don't get it. I have a macbook pro and a mac pro both backing up to sparsebundles on my Drobo, and my software is fully updated, and it's continuing to work fine. Is it because I created the sparsebundles on a version before 10.6.3 even though I'm using 10.6.3 now?

By: jon stevens

jon stevens — Fri, 14 May 2010 17:42:25 +0000

I'm the author of BackMyFruitUp. I'm working on porting netatalk 2.1 to the DroboShare (which is pretty much done), but like you said... 10.6.3 kind of screws us with this auto resizing thing. I may end up having to find another way to do things. I'm working on it though.

By: Tony

Tony — Fri, 14 May 2010 16:58:53 +0000

Tony said on May 12, 2010:

I just tried the sparsebundle approach last night freshly formatted Drobo set (500GB/500GB/1.5TB/1.5TB formatted using Drobo Dashboard to 16TB) using TimeTamer to create the sparsebundle.

TimeMachine backup fails every time and I'm forced to do a hard reboot.

The last Console entry is:
com.apple.backupd[440] No pre-backup thinning needed: 178.24 GB requested (including padding), 16.00 TB available

Anyone else experienced this and overcome it?

I'm going to try a few more times, maybe re-creating the sparsebundle manually, then I'm going to have to revert to using fixed partitions created via Dashboard.

Nope, no luck at all. backupd is freezing every time.
I posted on the Apple forum about this and no help there either. Someone also said, btw, that in OSX 10.6.3 TimeMachine automatically resizes its sparsebundles to the size of the disk its on, so not sure this method is now going to work ...