10.5.7 Jacked up my 2TB MyBook Mirror

After updating to 10.5.7 my Mac Mini is not picking up my 2TB Western Digital MyBook drive. I have tried Disk Utility and Disk Warrior 4.1.1 and neither of them pick up the drive. It just sits there flashing the full blue light.
Any ideas? I really need my drive back!

I had this happen with 2 x 1TB mybook drives and was not related to an OS update. They just stop working within a week of each other.
As i really needed to recover the data on the drives I had to break open the enclosure thus invalidate my warranty however the drives work perfectly in some generic FW enclosures I had.
I think the WesternDigital MyBook enclosures have poor firmware and are not so good.
There is much discussion as to why these drives make poor backup drives for making bootable clones. just google and you will see.
As suggested you could try your drive on a friends mac to see if they mount to rule out an issue with your mac.
I must point that WesternDigital have an excellent returns policy. Unfortunately I could not make use of that in my situation but have used with other drives in the past.

Similar Messages

Got a 2TB MyBook from WD but my G5 only finds 1TB

Just got a 2TB MyBook but my G5 only says 1TB, can't the G5 with OsX 10.5 hadle a drive larger than 1TB?
How do I get eht full 2TB?

It's all about asking questions first, there are no free lunches. WD MyBook is a common topic. But same can go for printers, SCSI controllers, video cards and more. No one likes to do homework, but it pays off.
This is their stripped RAID pre-configured 2TB edition:
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-WDH2Q20000N-Studio-Interface/dp/B0016P7H3Q
The mirror edition should say so.
Western Digital My Book Mirror Edition 2TB USB 2.0 (WDH2U20000N)
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Book-Mirror-WDH2U20000N/dp/B001B8RSAK/
Are you sure the software works in OS X? or is it only for Windows? and allow you to 'break' the RAID mirror?
WD MyBook Series:
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/index.asp?Cat=8
Studio Edition II Model: WDH2Q20000 (dual drive, RAID, TimeMachine supported)
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=410
Product Features
The speed you need - Lightning-fast FireWire® 800 combined with RAID 0 (Striped)

Backup fails with WD-MyBook 3TB USB Harddisk

We have a SBS Server 2011 and were Always able to create backups with external harddisks. However, we have purchased several WD MyBook 3TB disks and now the backup does not work anymore because of i/o error on external device. We can see the harddisk,
we can format the harddisk, we can copy data to the harddisk, but when used in a backup we get an error. We hope to solve this problem asap because we don't make backups now since the old (2TB) disks are already replaced by there because of bad blocks.

>Drives 2TB and under usually are created in traditional 512 method,
Not necessarily so,as most newer shipping drives are 4k sector.
Check out:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/1780.windows-small-business-server-external-backup-drives-compatibility-list.aspx
http://gadgets.itwriting.com/998-why-your-new-2tb-or-3tb-drive-will-not-work-with-windows-backup.html
PGM554
That's why I said
"Drives 2TB and under usually are created in traditional 512 method, however some manufacturers have made some under 2TB drives 4k, however I have found the western digital standard ones, always be the 512 type"
-Usually - means most, not all
I did also state "however some manufacturers have made some under 2TB drives 4k"
Both of these indicate that I did not say "ALL"???
Also I said "I have found the Western Digital standard drives to always be 512 type" - For the last 6months I have been buying 2TB MyBooks and Element drives nearly every week and using on Windows 7 systems - that means I must have in the last 6 months bought
and used on Windows 7 and XP over 40 2TB drives (I only buy 2TB, except for internal drives for Server2012 as I know that handles 4k) So far out of the 40 drives bought at different times, with whatever is on deal, with different end codes not a single one
has been made with 4k - hence why I recommend them. Also I have used both on SBS2008 and SBS2011 server installs for backups, and tested restores and both work without issue... further to that both work with Server 2008R2 (which they should as that is the
server os for SBS2011)

Western Digital MYBOOK Premium! **Issues**

I am getting bombarded with clients giving me the Western Digital MyBooks... and I am having the same issue on all of them!
At first, I had to format them using Disk Utility as "MAC OS EXTENDED" to avoid a disk error saying that the hard drive was full. After re-formating the drive, the transfer speeds are retardedly slow. (eg - about 28 hour to transfer 74 gigs).
I called Western Digital and they told me the hard-drive was defective. However, this is a familiar problem with the Western Digital brand.
I was wondering if there is a manual way to enhance the transfer speeds. I have it connected via USB 2.0 .

I don't know if this will be of any help for you since you are running the USB version of the mybook. We had a situation where we were using two 2TB Mybooks for secondary backup of a server. the Mybooks would lock up the finder after a few days, and we have had multiple issues with them. We found that the server was reporting a stuck process right off the bat after rebooting. It was a western digital program/driver for the mybook. Try deleting the below file and see how it works. USB will still be a bit slower than firewire however.
<volume>/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.WD.WDDriveServices.plist

HT201250 Time Machine + MyBook World Edition 2 Error message after update

I purchase a 2TB MyBook World Edition 2 at my local Apple store to back up the computers on my home network. After the latest update to Snow Leopard, Time Machine will no longer connect to the backup. I get the following error message: Connection Failed. The server "MyBookWorld.local" may not exist or it is unavailable at this time. Check the server name or IP address, check your network connection, and then try again.

Never mind, I fixed the problem by removing a lock feature from my external drive.

Setup drop-box folder on external drive for multiple Macs

Greetings,
I have a classroom full of photography students who need to turn in 4GB folders with pictures in them so that the teacher can grade them. We've discussed various options for facilitating this, with the only feasible solution we can come up with being setting up an external 2TB MyBook and having the kids go up, plug in the firewire and xfer their folder to the drive (see requirements below for why this is the feasible solution). One snag with this is that I want to set it up so that when the drive mounts, it's mounted as a drop-box share to prevent plagiarism as well as kids deleting/messing with other kids' projects. The problem is that each computer has different profiles so when the drop-box is setup correctly on one computer, another computer is plugged in and the folders are wide open again. Since I obviously can't setup the permissions for each profile on each computer, what options do I have to set this up? I'm open to different ideas/different ways to accomplish this, but here are the requirements:
- Drop-box-like functionality. Students can basically "submit" work, but only the teacher can view the files.
- Preferably the device needs to be hardwired to the MBP using Firewire. USB is too slow and these are wireless laptops without benefit of having any ethernet jacks accessible to them. They are all connecting through an Airport Extreme and xferring 4GB files wirelessly is not an option due to class time restraints.
- This has to work across 30 laptops with multiple user profiles.
- If software is a suggestion, free and/or OSS is preferable since this problem will be mitigated next school year with implementation of iMacs and Xserves in this program.

I would love how to do this as well. I actually tried moving a .mbox file out of ~/Library/Mailboxes/Mail and onto an external hard drive. Then I created an alias of the .mbox file and put it back into ~/Library/Mailboxes/Mail. No luck.

How can I safetly remove the contents of the hidden volumes folder?

I have 149GB of backedup data eating up my laptop's hard drive space (300GB). I want that space BACK! But I'm afraid that I'll jack up my system even worse if I go in there and start deleting files.
Here's the my story...
I tried many times (unsuccessfully) to get Time Machine to work with my external WD Mybook Mirror Edition Hard Drive. It was work initially but then fail to backup and it wouldn't even really give me a reason it would just say that it was unable to back up to the drive. So I gave up, turned time machine off and tried to drag what files had been backed-up by Time Machine from my external drive to the trash. That's where my problems multiplied.
As you may know Time Machine puts some niffy locks on the files. Even holding down the option key while dragging the files didn't seem to fix things. So after doing some poking around I found this thread on the internet which showed me how to remove the ACL associated with the backup files so that they could be removed.
http://forums.appleinsider.com/showthread.php?t=80598
I preformed the following command line on my drive:
sudo fsaclctl -p /Volumes/<yourVolume> -d
Then I dragged the backup files to the trash (using the option key) and eventually the files were deleted. At least they weren't showing up on my external drive anymore.
I thought that I was in the clear, but then yesterday I got this stupid your scratch disk is full warning while trying to use Photoshop. SO I took a peak at my local disk and discovered that I only had 45MB left on a 300GB drive. I quickly went through all of my folders in the finder looking at how much disk space they were taking up. It didn't add up. There had to be some files that the finder wasn't showing me. So did some more research online and came across this little gem:
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/maintscripts.html#Anchor-Manually-49575
And so I executed this command to manually perform Mac's maintenance scripts:
sudo periodic daily weekly monthly
This took a while but had no effect. A few hours later, I came across this utility on the internet:
http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnidisksweeper/
According to OmniDiskSweeper I have 149GB of files in a hidden "Volumes" folder. After looking at the files, it's pretty clear to me that I'm looking at the backups from either Carbon Copy Clone, or Time Machine (Guessing the Later). I have CCC setup to backup to the same external drive mentioned earlier, but I stopped this process when I realized that I had more files on my local drive than I should have.
*So back to my original question. How do I nuke these freaking files without breaking anything. Thanks.*

Niel,
Thank you for the response. I did as you suggested, and it worked. I had a few hiccups along the way:
1. Option + Dragging the files to the trash didn't work alone. I had to unlock the files:
$ chflags -R nouchg /myfiles
2. My external drive was mounted with a number after it. So I tried to eject it and it gave me some crap about it being in use (Even after I quit everything). So I shut my machine down, Disconnected the USB cable, Restarted and then reconnected the external drive. It now shows under volumes without the number after it.
Thank you for the help.
Message was edited by: strayhand

Linksys E4200: How to access USB hard drive remotely from Android phone or computer

Hello.
I just purchased a Linksys e4200 router today along with a WD 2TB MyBook hard drive. My intent is to set these two up together so that i can share files on the hard drive with:
Computers on my home network ( 1 Windows 7 desktop wired, 1 windows 7 laptop wifi, 1 XP netbook wifi)
Computers remotely over the internet
Smartphones (Android and Apple) on my home network
Smartphones (Android and Apple) remotely over the internet
My questions are:
Can all of this be done with the E4200?
Has anyone in the communiyt forums set-up remote access for fileshare with smartphones?
What is the easiest way to set-up and configure this?
Does anyone have experience using the WD MyBook Essential (WDBACW002OHBK)? Does it work well with the E4200?
Thank you in advance for all responses and help.

Hi,
Major concern in your case now, seems like is all about accessing the data from that Shared Hard Drive remotely over the internet....
For that very reason, we can use either of the two ways to access the shared Hard Drive or Network Hard Drive remotely....However, for both the ways, we need to have a public IP address coming in from the modem...(192.168.X.X....172.16.X.X....10.X.X.X...are examples for Private IP, rest all are public IP's)
One of the ways to get this done is through the WAN IP that you are getting from Modem on your connected Cisco Router's status page....Open the set up page with http://192.168.1.1 , go to Status tab - look out for WAN IP - should be a public IP address not a private one....,then so as to access it, you have type in http://wanip:sharename....
Other way round to do the same is via getting the WAN IP converted to the domain name, this is done via dynamic domain naming system (refer to http://TZO.org) in which we converts our WAN IP into a domain name, which will continue to update the ever changing public IP address (WAN IP) on the daily basis....then so as to access it, you have type in http://domainname:sharename.....

Slow performance from externally attached drive to server

We have a new 2TB external drive connected via USB to our server running 10.5.5. For some odd reason, some users are getting the beachball of death when connecting to certain folders on this volume. I'm able to connect via my machine running 10.5.x, but it takes upwards of a minute to simply display the folder listing. We don't have a FW 400-to-800 cable, so we can't hook it up via firewire.
This is one of those new 2TB MyBook Western Digital external drives, which we've found to be a bit flaky. So, that could be the problem.

USB is the worst possible interface for external media. It is slow and will always be slow, so that's one factor.
A second contributor comes with folders that contain many files (e.g. thousands). The Finder has a real problem reading that many files in one directory, even off a direct-attached disk, and that problem is exacerbated over a network connection.
Put the two issues together and you almost have a worst-case scenario. Moving to a faster interface such as FireWire will help, but if that's not an option, reorganizing the data into fewer files per folder may be your workaround.

Adobe PS CS4 does not "see" my USB Drives in Finder

For some bizarre reason, PS CS4 is no longer "finding" my USB 2TB drive in the Finder/Devices window on my iMac (nothing is showing in devices). However, it is seeing my my WD NAS drives, and if I go into Finder on my own, it shows the USB drives. The WD drives are a 2TB MyBook, and a 3TB MyCloud. I have had some issues with _those_ drives showing up in Finder but its usually a WD firmware issue... and its usually the older MyBook drive that gives me problems. Anyway... the aforementioned 2TB USB drive also appears (as it should) on the RHS of my iMac screen. The drive is working just fine, and I have tried powering off the computer and the USB drive... still doesn't show using Photoshop. I can search within finder for the file I want, and right-click to open in "Adobe Photoshop" but I'm so used to grabbing, editing, and saving files from within CS4 that I'm baffled that this drive all of a sudden can't be "seen" from within PS CS4. Previously it had been, so I have to assume its some settings or preferences issue?

As noted above, I am now able to "see" the missing USB drive(s) in Finder so that seems to be resolved. However, a few new issues have cropped up:
1. Not all my installed fonts are in my font listing, but I'll assume I can easily remedy that by activating them (I hope). I have the sneaking suspicion I deleted some by mistake.
2. Safari seems to have gone weird... the upper section is flashing like crazy when I try to type in a URL, also the sidebars flash when I scroll up or down with mouse. I've installed Chrome so I have a stable browser for the time being.
3. No matter what I seem to do in preferences, every new image I open does so within the same window so I have to manually drag it out to compare images. How do I fix that permanently?
4. When I first opened PS this morning I kept getting some sort of error popup that couldn't complete the request?
Is it safe now to remove the new user account?
Mike

Time machine multiple backup drives question

Time machine to backup to my 2TB MyBook drive. I wanted a second backup on a portable 1TB, so in time machine settings, I selected the 1TB drive, and then clicked the "Replace" button, instead of the "Use both" button. Currently the 1TB drive is backing up from scratch.
So will I be able to select my 2TB MyBook drive after the 1TB is backed up and disconnected? I mean, can I resume time machine backups where I left off?
Most of what I've read (after the fact) seems to suggest that I should have clicked the "Use both" button, then just removed the 1TB drive.
-Thanks

I find tm doesn't remember the drives anyway. I have a dedicated drive for lion and mountain lion as I have both lion and mountain lion installed on my mac. When I'm in either os and connect the appropriate drive and start tm I still have to go in and select the drive. Tm says there are no older backups, but there are, until the new partial backup completes. Then it lists al the backups on that drive.
Now maybe if you leave tm on all the time it might work differently but I don't care for it creating local snapshots and I only connect the externals when I want to do a backup.
So bottom line is you shouldn't have any problem when you connect the other drive. At that time, when you have to select that original tm backup drive, you can click the option to use both.

External Storage Solutions-Western Digital-Professional Photographer Views

I am a photographer shooting around 30000 images (RAW) per year. My current configuration is Alu iMac with Aperture 1.5.6, Photoshop C3 on the internal drive with my library and images on external drives. I have a total of 7 drives, all from Western Digital (4 500 GB MyBook Pro), 2 2TB MyBook Pro Edition II, and 1 750GB MyBook Pro). Two of the 500GB drives are back ups for the two primary 500GB ones, and one of the TB drives is a back up of the primary 1 TB drive. Back ups are done 2-3 times per week. Don’t really want to do RAID because I want to control the timing of the backups and do not want them to be instantaneous.
After completing all the work related to a session, all masters (including the PS files) are exported from the project so all images are referenced in the library.
All of the external drives are on a single FW800 daisy chain.
THE PROBLEM: On occasion (1-4 times per week), when I wake my iMac from a sleep, none of the external drives are responsive and the Finder crashes. This forces me to do a hard shutdown of the iMac, unplug the FW800 cable, turn the power off on the drives (unplug them). Then I plug drives back in, reconnect the FW800 cable to the iMac, and then turn the iMac on again. All the drives boot and are responsive.
The second problem is random “unexpected device removal” usually occurring on wake up but not necessarily.
DEBUGGING: I have emailed with Western Digital technical support extensively to try to better understand the problems and how to solve them. There are comments that are puzzling/worrisome:
One response from Western Digital as a copy/paste
1. We have only successfully daisy chained two drives through a single FireWire port. Anything beyond two drives will work erratically. I recommend you connect your drives one at a time or with one USB and the other FireWire.
My comment: The Apple site states that up to 16 devices can be attached via a single port with a total of 63 devices attached. So apparently Western Digital does not test for compliance with the expectation of number attached drives (A bit of inaccurate/false advertising on their part?)
They suggested I reinstall WDButtonManager software downloaded from their website which resulted in the installation of software that was older than the one I had on my system. I have had considerable more difficulty with that new installation. In addition, the Western Digital technical support person said
2.If you "get info" on the WD Button Manager from the package installation should show v1.15. However, we have had no newer version of the button manger so even if you do find one that says v1.30 then the version number is wrong. Nonetheless, I still recommend you drag your drives into the trashcan on the dock before turning off your computer or putting it in sleep mode.
My comment: The concept of manually ejecting the drives before going into sleep mode is not viable. I do conversions/exports/backup that can take a while and cannot wait around until they are completed to manually eject the drives.
Western Digital Technical Support comment back to me:
3. I'm sorry you don't like the suggestion of dragging the drive into the trashcan but Mac computers leave the FireWire connections active during power-off states. This causes the MyBook’s auto on/off functionality to become confused and not power up or detect after resuming from a sleep state. We have no way of disabling the auto on/off functionality on the drive so the only thing you can do is to drag it into the trashcan before turning off your computer or putting it to sleep.
QUESTIONS:
1. How are other photographers solving image storage issues?
2. Whose devices are you using and what has been your experience?
3. Does anyone have a solution or work around for the Western Digital issues?
UPDATE (Dec 5, 2007): I talked today with a second level support and they essentially told me the same thing as the first level support. They told me that it was something wrong with my computer so I asked if they were aware of particular software that causes the problem. The answer was no.

Problem: the drives do not power up when I wake up from sleep every time. Sometimes they do, but frequently they don't. This results in the Finder hanging...and requires a complete reboot as I described above.
Western digital drives will power down even with the computer on, if you have not accessed the drive for a while. I believe this process is controlled by the WDBM software (Button Manager). They will also power down when I put to computer to sleep. I am guessing that there is some sort of conflict between these two power down functions or some conflict between the two different power up functions.
I reinstalled an "older, but newer version" of the Button Manager and reset the PRAM on Sunday. Next steps will be to remove the Button Manager software from the /Library/Startup folder and see if that helps. I have a call into the WD to see if anyone there can tell me the function of the WDBM software and how much risk there is to not using it.

Finder fails to list shared drives by clicking sidebar

I have a strange problem that is persistent and although not always repeatable, happens very often, and by that I mean several times a day. The problem was also there with Leopard, and I'd hoped Snow Leopard and it's subsequent updates might fix things, but they didn't, so I'm posting here.
I have a Mac mini running as a kind of server / appliance. It's running standard Snow Leopard, but sharing a collection of 6 Firewire 800 2TB MyBook Studio II drives with the other Macs in my home.
The problem that I'm having is when I click the Mac mini icon in the Shared section of the finder sidebar, around 50% of the time, I get a spinning wait icon, and after a fairly long period of time, an error message saying that I can't connect to the Mac mini.
If I do CMD+K and type afp://'Mac mini IP address' it works fine, connecting in seconds, and asking me which share I'd like to connect to. Usually after I've connected in this way, I can go back to the Shared part of the side bar, click Mac mini and it will connect and show me all the shares fine. This isn't always the case, but usually.
The Firewire drives that I'm using do have their own power saving function which will power down the drives if there's no activity for approximately 10 minutes. They will power on in about 20 seconds when needed, and this clearly isn't the problem, because the CMD+K option works fine and lists the drives without turning them on. Obviously if I try to connect to one of them, I'll have to wait for the drives to spin up, but everything connects and works fine.
Because the CMD+K option works so well, I have a feeling that this might be to do with DNS. I am using an Airport Extreme 802.11n single channel for my router, so I'd be surprised if this was the case, I'm all Apple here.
Does anyone know how I might fix this problem, or even some things that I can do to try?

Bump...

Setting up swappable RAID drives using 2 externals?

Hoping somebody might be able to offer me a solution to a little problem I seem to be
having setting up a OS X software RAID using 2 external drives.
I had 2 external drives set-up in a RAID:
2TB ioSafe
2TB WD
The WD failed and I bought a new WD 2TB MyBook. When I went to swap it into the RAID
it failed because the new drive was a bit bigger in terms of actual capacity than the other
drive was smaller than the ioSafe and therefore determined the size of RAID. I then
purchased ANOTHER 2 TB WD MyBook which is now a different size that the other one I
got. Now I know I can copy the data to one of the drives, create a RAID with the other
and the ioSafe and then copy all the data back. However, since I have this extra drive
I was hoping to create the ability to swap back and forth between the 2 drives. That
way I could remove one take it offsite and put in the other and rebuild the RAID.
Obviously this won't work with if the drives have different capacities.
I thought if I partitioned them both to 1.99 TB then the size would be determined by the
OS and not the drive, but somehow 1.99TB partitions on each drive are very different
in actual size.
Does anyone have any suggestions how I could make this work? Maybe I need some
third party software?

Use > Carbon Copy Cloner and make Clones instead of messing around with RAID.
I've been using CCC for years and have never been let down.
I do incremental backups on 3 different drives.
1 drive as I add new projects, photos and music
1 drive for daily backups
1 drive for weekly backups

Time Machine, External Hard Drives, Drobos, questions....

I'm not sure if I'm posting this in the right place, but feel free to point me somewhere else if not. I'm a professional photographer transitioning into some video work and am currently working out a media drive / backup drive solution to suit the needs of a one man band. Currently I have a couple of 2TB MyBooks running, and backup from one to the other each night, which isn't the most elegant solution but has worked so far. I've just ordered a Drobo and hard disks to give me a little more peace of mind, but because the Drobo isn't known for being the fastest solution in the world (at least the basic model isn't), I'm also purchasing a G-Tech Raid drive to use as my active media drive.
I'm hoping the following is possible and hoping someone can answer a couple of questions I have about using the following setup. I plan to use Time Machine as a backup solution, which saves me continually having to copy and check files are all in the right place each night as I do at the moment when manually backing up. I believe it's possible to have the G-Raid drive, which is where all media will be placed when importing, as part of a Time Machine backup that will put the contents of my iMac (which is not much, just core software) and the G-Raid onto the Drobo, and keep things updated when files are changed, updated or deleted.
The first thing I wanted to check is that I'm right in the assumption that the above scenario is not a problem? I'm guessing not as it seems lots of people use variances on this method. But what I'm wondering is, what happens when I fill the 1 or 2 TB raid drive (G-tech), and want to change it out for another one, and the Drobo, which has more and expandable storage, is not full? If I remove the G-Tech drive and replace it with a new one, will Time Machine just carry on as normal, leaving all the original data that was on the older drive untouched on the Drobo and still accessible in the future?
Is it better to partition the Drobo and create a section that is the same size as the current media drive I'm using (500gb, 1tb, etc...) and point the Time Machine to use that section, and then switch to a new partition when putting in a new media drive, or is that unnecessary and overcomplicating things?
I'm assuming that a lot of people tend to have 1 external hard drive working as their media drive, and another running time machine and backing up whatever's on the media drive, and that these drives are the same size, and a swapped out for new ones simultaneously when full. But if you are using a much larger backup drive, like a Drobo, then what do you do in the above situations?
Basically, I want a simple solution that allows me to have a fast (firewire 800 max as I'm using an iMac atm), media drive attached and which is backed up to a drive with redundancy, like a Drobo, and where I can change out that media drive without a problem and changes made on it are mirrored on the backup drive (but where data doesn't get deleted on the backup drive if I need to change out the media drive). My data needs are met with the above mentioned drives and I don't yet need to start investing in more advanced systems to deal with what I'm doing, I just need a solution that is simple, doesn't require excessive time spent tweaking and monitoring things, and where my data is safe if a drive fails.
Finally, I'm guessing if the above scenario is possible then I'll be connecting the G-Tech to the Firewire 800 port and the Drobo to the USB, but I thought I'd ask whilst I'm here whether anybody knows if you can daisy chain the Drobo to the G-Tech via Firewire and still have it operating as a separate backup drive using Time Machine; if this method is possible would people reccomend it over using the iMac's USB port?
Many thanks in advance for any help or suggestions people can offer, and sorry that was such a huge ramble.

I'm not sure if I'm posting this in the right place, but feel free to point me somewhere else if not. I'm a professional photographer transitioning into some video work and am currently working out a media drive / backup drive solution to suit the needs of a one man band. Currently I have a couple of 2TB MyBooks running, and backup from one to the other each night, which isn't the most elegant solution but has worked so far. I've just ordered a Drobo and hard disks to give me a little more peace of mind, but because the Drobo isn't known for being the fastest solution in the world (at least the basic model isn't), I'm also purchasing a G-Tech Raid drive to use as my active media drive.
I'm hoping the following is possible and hoping someone can answer a couple of questions I have about using the following setup. I plan to use Time Machine as a backup solution, which saves me continually having to copy and check files are all in the right place each night as I do at the moment when manually backing up. I believe it's possible to have the G-Raid drive, which is where all media will be placed when importing, as part of a Time Machine backup that will put the contents of my iMac (which is not much, just core software) and the G-Raid onto the Drobo, and keep things updated when files are changed, updated or deleted.
The first thing I wanted to check is that I'm right in the assumption that the above scenario is not a problem? I'm guessing not as it seems lots of people use variances on this method. But what I'm wondering is, what happens when I fill the 1 or 2 TB raid drive (G-tech), and want to change it out for another one, and the Drobo, which has more and expandable storage, is not full? If I remove the G-Tech drive and replace it with a new one, will Time Machine just carry on as normal, leaving all the original data that was on the older drive untouched on the Drobo and still accessible in the future?
Is it better to partition the Drobo and create a section that is the same size as the current media drive I'm using (500gb, 1tb, etc...) and point the Time Machine to use that section, and then switch to a new partition when putting in a new media drive, or is that unnecessary and overcomplicating things?
I'm assuming that a lot of people tend to have 1 external hard drive working as their media drive, and another running time machine and backing up whatever's on the media drive, and that these drives are the same size, and a swapped out for new ones simultaneously when full. But if you are using a much larger backup drive, like a Drobo, then what do you do in the above situations?
Basically, I want a simple solution that allows me to have a fast (firewire 800 max as I'm using an iMac atm), media drive attached and which is backed up to a drive with redundancy, like a Drobo, and where I can change out that media drive without a problem and changes made on it are mirrored on the backup drive (but where data doesn't get deleted on the backup drive if I need to change out the media drive). My data needs are met with the above mentioned drives and I don't yet need to start investing in more advanced systems to deal with what I'm doing, I just need a solution that is simple, doesn't require excessive time spent tweaking and monitoring things, and where my data is safe if a drive fails.
Finally, I'm guessing if the above scenario is possible then I'll be connecting the G-Tech to the Firewire 800 port and the Drobo to the USB, but I thought I'd ask whilst I'm here whether anybody knows if you can daisy chain the Drobo to the G-Tech via Firewire and still have it operating as a separate backup drive using Time Machine; if this method is possible would people reccomend it over using the iMac's USB port?
Many thanks in advance for any help or suggestions people can offer, and sorry that was such a huge ramble.

10.5.7 Jacked up my 2TB MyBook Mirror

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