Retrodata RAID Recovery

Data Robotics uses a proprietary RAID level known as Drobo BeyondRAID. This in itself means that highly specialist skills are required to perform Drobo BeyondRAID recovery, and the chances of causing irreparable damage by trying to recover yourself are very high.

Furthermore, BeyondRAID is not pure RAID. It utilises a mix of RAID 1 and RAID 5 technology with the typical JBOD characteristics, enabling the use of hot-swap hard drives and capacity or volume upgrades on the fly. The following are some of the reasons that make Data Robotics Drobo systems different from standard RAID configurations, and far more complex to recover:

• The facility for on-the-fly expansion (hot-swapping)
• The incorporation of virtualization
• The facility to re-order hard drives in the array
• The ability to use hard drives of differing capacities

All these options serve to make data recovery awkward, since there are no standard, set parameters or configurations. These need to be calculated manually. To further complicate matters, Drobo NAS devices use a proprietary virtualisation layer that manages the redundancy aspect of the file system.

Why Retrodata? • Can you recover my data? • Emergency Recovery • Why RAID fails