A couple weeks ago I found a great deal on a used Drobo on Amazon. I got it for $350, when they normal go for $500 or so new. I also had a $250 in gift cards, so it only costed me $100. It was the Drobo 5N because I believe networked attached is the way to go. It was the main reason I stayed away from Drobos when they first came out. It took them a little bit to release network attached versions.

I bought two 4 TB drives, which after the redundancy, gives me 3.5 TBs of backup. With three open drive bays, my backup needs should be covered for years to come.

I still have my Synology NAS, and in most ways, it’s probably better than a Drobo. Synology has tons a great software that it can run, the Drobo is pretty limited. My Synology is only a 2 drive bay version, and it was running low on space, so I needed to do something. So now I have the best of both worlds. I has access to all the Synology servers and apps, and still have massive storage available on my Drobo.

Even though both the Drobo and Synology run raid arrays and if one drive fails, I just have to put in a new drive and I’m good to go, all my data is safe; they still need to be backed up. If I ever have a fire, or some kind of hardware fail on either system, I could lose data. In the past I’ve been backing everything to the cloud on Amazon Drive, but it costs $60 a year, and in 2017 I’m going to try to limit some of my online spending. So now I’m using Carbon Copy Cloner to backup my Synology and Drobo and I’m storing the backup drives at work. It’s a little bit more work, but I’m saving $60 a year.