Cloning external hard drive to Drobo
 

I am new to Superduper. I have searched the forum but I cannot find a solution to my problem.

I have an external hard drive that keeps all my music and photos that is rapidly filling up. I want to keep all this data on a drobo and I am looking for a way to clone the drive to the Drobo. I would then use the Drobo to hold all past and future data so this would not be a backup. I am hoping that then I will be able to disconnect the old drive and itunes and iphoto will see the cloned Drobo instead and I will have expandable storage. Is superduper a good solution for this?

Would I simply choose to "backup-all files"? If I choose to erase the Drobo and then copy the files from the source drive, will this create a problem with the Drobo?

Thanks for the help.

If you want to move your music, you'd generally set iTunes to use the Drobo as the Library and "Consolidate music library". iPhoto you'd just copy its library and open it...

I tried to consolidate the library but because some of the music is in the itunes folder and some is not, the process did not work and I was looking for another solution. If I could go back in time, I would definitely not have the music organized this way but I am left with the consequences and am looking for an easier solution than rebuilding the whole library.

As long as the music is in iTunes itself, consolidation should work, Craig - did it give some kind of error?

How will you back up the Drobo?
 

Craig -- Once you have your music and photos on the Drobo, how will you back up the Drobo? Yes, you have data redundancy built into the Drobo but suppose there's a fire or someone steals it or there's a glitch that prevents you from accessing the drives in the Drobo? Will you use SuperDuper! to back up the Drobo to another Drobo, or to another drive?

I was once contemplating using a Drobo, but once I thought it through I then realized I still had to have a backup of what I was going to put on the Drobo and it just made more sense to use a single drive instead of a Drobo (and I keep that drive backed up with SuperDuper!).

Entirely true, of course: any time a file is only in one place, even if that place is 'redundant', the file is vulnerable.

It did not give an error. It was unable to consolidate the whole library. I wound up with about 6000 of 12000 songs in the library after the consolidation. About half of the songs just didn't show up in the consolidated library. I did it twice with no luck. This was about a year ago that I tried to consolidate so maybe the process has gotten better with updates to itunes.

I do have a backup plan. I backup all the files to another external hard drive that I take offsite about once a month. The thing I was interested in with the drobo was expandability and not continually piling on new hard drives. I currently use apple's program backup to do it but was using this process to get familiarized with superduper to try and implement it.

So my original intentions with superduper will probably not work? I may look into the consolidation route again. Thanks.

If you have a bunch of music sort of all over the place, it's not going to copy and be recognized unless you let iTunes do it.

It's possible they've fixed problems you've had recently. I'd give it another try (after backing up your library, etc, of course).