Drobo storage boxes were popular with photographers, video editors and small offices because you could mix drives of different sizes and add capacity without thinking about RAID levels. Drobo products are no longer made and official support has ended, so when one fails today there is no manufacturer to call – and the wrong first move can make the data much harder to get back. This guide explains how a Drobo stores your files, what its lights are telling you, and what to do (and not do) when it stops working.
Why a Drobo is different from an ordinary RAID
A Drobo uses Drobo’s own system, called BeyondRAID. Instead of a standard RAID 1 or RAID 5 layout, it splits your data into blocks and spreads them, with redundancy, across whatever drives are installed, keeping track of where everything is in its own metadata. That is what lets it use mixed drive sizes and grow the volume as you swap in bigger disks.
The catch is that the layout is proprietary. Take a drive out and connect it to a PC or Mac and it won’t show a readable volume – Windows will usually offer to initialise or format it, and macOS will say the disk is unreadable. The data is still there, but it only makes sense when every drive’s contents and the BeyondRAID metadata are read together.
What the lights mean
Each drive bay has its own light. Exact behaviour varies a little between models, but in general:
- Green – the drive in that bay is healthy.
- Yellow – a warning, typically that the Drobo is approaching full capacity and wants a larger drive.
- Red – the drive in that bay has failed or should be replaced, or the unit is critically full.
- Flashing green and yellow – “data protection in progress”: the Drobo is redistributing data after a drive change. Don’t switch it off or remove drives while this is happening.
- No lights, or the unit keeps restarting – often a power supply or controller problem rather than the drives themselves.
Drobo Dashboard, the management software, gives more detail if the unit still connects to your computer.
Things not to do
- Don’t pull drives out and put them back in a different order. If you do need to remove them, label each drive with its bay number first.
- Don’t connect the drives to a computer and accept any offer to initialise, format or “repair” them. That overwrites exactly the metadata a recovery depends on.
- Don’t insert a new or blank drive into a Drobo that is already struggling in the hope it will rebuild. If another drive is weak, a rebuild can push it over the edge, and an interrupted relayout is one of the hardest situations to recover from.
- Don’t keep power-cycling a unit that won’t mount. Each restart puts more wear on drives that may already be failing.
- Don’t run data recovery software on the Drobo volume if it is mounting with errors; general tools don’t understand BeyondRAID and can write to the volume.
What you can safely try
If the Drobo has no lights at all, check the power supply: external power bricks on desktop models are a common failure, and a replacement adapter with the correct rating can bring the unit back. If it powers up and every bay is green but the volume won’t appear, try a different cable and port and check whether Drobo Dashboard can see the unit. Beyond that, stop. If the data matters and there is no other copy, the next step should be imaging the drives, not experimenting with them.
Can you move the drives to another Drobo?
Drobo did allow a complete set of drives (a “disk pack”) to be moved to another compatible Drobo, in the same order. It can work when the drives themselves are healthy and the original unit’s electronics have failed. It is risky if any drive is weak, if the replacement unit has a different firmware, or if it has had other drives in it before, because the receiving Drobo may try to reconcile or reset the pack. With no manufacturer support left, we recommend imaging every drive first, so that whatever happens, the original data is preserved.
How Drobo data recovery works
In the lab, each drive is first cloned sector by sector, with failing drives handled on specialist imaging equipment so they are read as gently as possible. All further work happens on the copies. The BeyondRAID layout is then reconstructed from the images in software, the volume is rebuilt virtually, and your files are copied to a new drive. Because the original drives are only read, never written to, this approach also preserves the option of trying again if the first reconstruction is incomplete.
See our Drobo data recovery service for the models we work with, and our RAID data recovery and NAS data recovery pages for other storage systems. You can bring your Drobo and all its drives to our lab at Unit 1, 80 Willow Walk, London SE1 5SY, arrange a courier collection, or call 020 7394 2525 for advice before you do anything else.
