(Just about this time last year, we awarded 25 Drobos to the grand prize winners of the “What Would You Do With 100 Drobos?” contest. Chris Blyth of GoodMakers Films was a grand prize winner and yesterday as we were wondering how he was doing – out of the blue – we received this message from Chris. I’ve edited it down it a bit, but wanted to tell you his story in his own words. If you’re in a hurry, watch the video right now and find out a little about GoodMakers projects @ dro.bo/OTIYim – It’s a great video! Victoria, admin)
“It’s been a while since we’ve spoken, and I wanted to give you a wee update on what been happening with GoodMakers, and how we’ve been using our Drobos.
“First I want to say again, how helpful having Drobo’s support is at GoodMakers. It’s literally made the difference for us being in production or not. Our stories simply would have not been completed if it weren’t for your help.
“Our Drobos are on day & night, 27/4 and have been since we installed them.
“I have always been staggered on how robust they are. Once after we had replaced a drive to expand our storage, the Drobo was busy rebuilding. This obviously took hours.. long enough for a storm to roll in. Even though the Drobo was connected to a UPS, its power was cut when a lightning strike hit so close, it fried the UPS. We waited for the storm to clear.. and plugged in the Drobo, expecting complete failure at worst, to significant data loss at best…
“We got neither : the DroboPro booted back up and continued to rebuild itself as if nothing had happened.. with an almost, ‘What ?… ‘ attitude from the DroboPro.. 
“We use our Drobo’s to full capacity ! Using the main DroboPro (which is sadly nearly full) for our main storage pool, and our DroboFS for archiving.
“We have also set up our long-term archive system, made out of our old drives put into Drobo’s – 16 drives in total !They are full to the brim.. I know.. not the best scenario.
“After letting spotlight index everything, it’s remarkable how easy it is to find older footage. We installed this just last week, and it has already been completely helpful having everything there in one place.
“We also have another editing workstation, where a Drobo is the Time Machine for that system, and which 2 days ago completely saved us in the middle of production, when the main OSX boot drive died… again..
“I just realized that it’s kinda full too..
“Most of the the rest of the ‘ 100 Drobos’ drives have been shipped out to charities here and in Africa …”
Watch a video of Chris getting his Drobos and find out a little about GoodMaker projects @ dro.bo/OTIYim – It’s a great video!
And I’ll save the rest for a follow-up post in a couple of days.
admin
I'm the admin of blog.drobo.com and I manage www.drobo.com and love doing both in addition to other marketing tasks for Drobo. I welcome any suggestions you have for either the blogsite or our corporate website. Please contact me (Victoria Thomas) at vthomas@drobo.com